How to Fully Backup Your Windows 10 PC

Aren’t you afraid of having your system or hard drive fail one day?

Do you want to create a Backup of your Windows in case something goes wrong?

We all agree that problems won’t show up with a notice, troubles may happen at any time, any day of the week!

Creating a Backup is very useful and essential especially if you have very important data you don’t want to lose, in case your hard drive go down or a virus hit your operating system and wipe every “Byte” of it.

Now if you want to avoid such a nightmare you can create a System Image once in a time and save it to an external hard drive. The useful part is that you can use the same trick to install the same system in multiple computers at work or at an Internet Café.

It’s true that Windows 10 might look unstable at the beginning but is still a good operating system providing high speeds compared to older versions of Windows. Sometimes creating a System Image can help you get around problems that can only be solved by resetting your computer. Having a Backup Image of your system is a bliss!

Please keep in mind that this isn’t a brand new function… In fact it got carried ahead from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and now on to Windows 10.

0. What’s a System Image’ Backup?

The System Image Backup is a function in Windows 10 that permits you to create a backup image of Windows in its present state. Later you need to use the identical system picture to restore Windows 10 or to repair your PC. On occasions, your PC will refuse to boot due to malfunction and the perfect factor to repair your PC could be the Windows system image backup disk. This might additionally let you set up the Windows 10 on another PC without having to download the ISO from the start.

Nonetheless, earlier than you proceed with making a Windows system picture backup, you can always choose to do the backup or not. You can also select the drives to back up.

The Windows system picture backup would backup every part of your PC in its present state.

1. Before you Create a System Image Backup

All you need for this tutorial is an external storage drive (e.g External Hard Drive, USB Flash Drive, SD Card, …) with enough space (e.g 64GB, 128GB) for it to save the Backup of your system. If your hard drive doesn’t have enough space think about deleting large files taking most of the space on your PC using the awesome free program WinDirStat.

During this process please make sure your PC is recharging or connected to a power supply…

And if using a brand new Hard Drive please format it, if it has some data don’t worry you can keep it there.

The System Image Backup will be created in a folder named WindowsImageBackup.

2. Create a System Backup Image of Your Windows 10

Open up the Settings app using the Win+I key combination or from the Start menu by clicking in the gear on the left side 

Click on “Update & security (Windows Update, recovery, backup)“”.

Select “Backup” tab on the left side and click on “Go to Backup and Restore (Windows 7)“.

This may open Windows 7 backup and Restore part in a brand new window. Click on “Create a system image” from the left aspect.

You can also access it from Control Panel or the God Mode folder, just change the View by: to Large icons and you should see the Backup and Restore (Windows 7) feature. You can also search for it in the Start menu.

You should see your external hard drive in the list. If not make sure it’s connected properly to your computer.

Click “Next“.

Your C: (mostly) which contains your Windows and the System Reserved partition will both be selected by default. You can select additional drives as you wish and click “Next“.

Click on “Start backup“.

The backup will be created then saved to its destination. In my case since I had an SSD and a USB 3.0 external Hard Drive the process was smooth and fast. You may wait for couple dozen of minutes if you have an HDD drive with a slow external Hard Drive.

You can at anytime stop the backup by clicking “Stop backup“.

After the creation of your System Backup Image you will be prompted to create a system disc which can come handy in case your system failed to boot and you will need that disc to recover the Backup System Image you just created.

Restore Windows 10 with Windows 10 System Backup picture

Now in case you ever wish to restore your PC from the Backup, then these steps will present you the right way to do it.

• If you have access to your system hold SHIFT and restart your computer. You will get a blue screen, click on “Troubleshoot” > “Advanced options“”.
• If you can’t access Windows then use your DVD Windows Installation or create a Bootable USB Windows Installer and boot it up.

Click on “System Image Recovery” as shown in the image below.

Click on your account.

If you don’t have a password just click “Continue“, otherwise put your password on and continue.

Now the software will detect automatically the Image Backup, if it didn’t select it manually from your external hard drive. The backup is in form of a folder called WindowsImageBackup.

Click “Next >“.

Here you can go deep and install drivers in case you have checked multiple drives during the backup but they don’t show up on the top corner.

Click “Next >“.

Click “Finish“.

Don’t forget that all data will be restored and replaced. It’s like formatting and copying all new data to your hard drive.

Click “Yes“.

After some time your system should be set to go!

If you have any questions about how to create a Backup for your system feel free to leave a comment down below.