Windows 7 Backup Fails (Not Enough Disk Space)

I just tried to create a Disk Image of my system to protect against future system crashes using Windows 7 Backup feature. I select my M: drive which is my extra internal storage. It's a 1.5 TB drive, of which 731 GB are free. It says it will backup the Local Disk C: and the Reserved System Partition (which will take up to 71 GB according to Windows).

However, it gives me the error message that I'm sure many are familar with that it does not have enough disk space to creat the shadow drive, etc. Ofcourse this is not acurate as I have tons of free space on the destination drive.

Anyone know how to resolve this issue? I also have System Protection on at the default 2% setting, if that helps.

Thanks!

 

I suspect it's complaining about lack of free space on your system partition rather than on the destination drive. What's the used and free space like on C?

 

I checked in Disk Managment under Computer Managment and it has my primary drive assigned to Disk 0. It says that the C: partition has 85% free (394.86 GB free out of 465.66 GB capacity). The System Reserved partition has 38% free (38 MB free out of 100 MB capacity).

I have to check here because the System Reserved partition does not appear in the My Computer window.

Thanks!

 

Not that then :confused Just don't know J8son - don't use Win 7's backup as prefer 3rd party imaging apps.

 

I have to agree. Have seen many failures with Windows system resore and backup. I'm at the point where I almost instinctively abandon Microsoft solutions for 3rd party apps.

I'm using Comodo Time Machine, it hasn't let me down so far...

 

Snapshot programs such as Comodo Time Machine, Rollback or Wondershare Time Shuttle are great for quickly dealing with failed installs, virus infections and other software problems but don't cover you against disk failure. What's more they are incompatible with using boot disks or imaging systems such as Acronis and are an absolute nightmare in dual/triple boot situations. I was bowled over by Time Shuttle for a while but don't use it now - too many downsides. It's Acronis every time for me.

 

I always prefer to do images outside of windows loading. I feel there is less danger of problems being introduced.
I use Acronis and boot it from a CD that loads into RAM and make my image from there.

I always do full images and I rotate where they are stored. I have two external hard drives and a spindle of burned DVDs. That way, if one image doesn't work, I have different images at two other locations to select from.

 

Doubt it makes any difference plodr but I've been using Acronis for over ten years now, done dozens of restores, never once had a failure, and all backups were created from the installed program. Current versions, once you've created your backup scheme, have simplified it to just one click to create a new backup version. With Acronis you are bombproof

 

Good point. In my case that's all I need. All my files are backed up onto 2 external disks. When I have a drive failure, I load the OS onto the new drive, get my apps and files from storage. Drive faiures, thankfully, don't happen that often. "failed installs, virus infections and other software problems" seem to be much more common in my experience.

 

Thanks for all the info regarding the backup issue.

So, with all the recommendations, it seems I'll need to go 3rd party to accomplsih this.

In a perfect world, after I wipe my HDD and install a fresh copy of Windows 7 I can use my image to restore every app and every setting across the board to where it will essentialy restore everything to exacly what my system looks like today in just a few clicks.

What's my best solution for this out of all the suggetsions above (or even some that weren't mentioned)? FYI, I'm willing to spend some coin on it if it would make this easier.

 

Let me tell you about my one catastrophic failure. (October 2009)
I was restoring an image and the electricity cut off. No it wasn't a stormy day and no one would guess by the weather that we'd lose our electric.
Of course when I turned on the computer (laptop battery is past the point of holding a charge so it was useless), I got the black screen with the white printing no OS installed after some error messages.

After thinking about what to do for a day, I figured I had nothing to lose and set the BIOS to boot from the Acronis CD and tried the restore again. The location it found for the install was D or E. My CD drive was given the C drive letter. I attempted the restore again. It worked and when I rebooted, I was glad to see that my windows install was now given C. (I thought I might have to do some changing to get windows back on C).

When a hard drive dies and you need to replace it, in the same computer, or the power cuts out while the computer is restoring and you are left with a scrambled, unusable hard drive, that Acronis CD loading the program into RAM will be priceless.

 

Is there no further options I can trouble shoot to possibly get the Windows backup to work. I need this done ASAP and it would easier to just use the in house one.

I've heard it might have something to do with things like BitDefender running in the background.

 

Update:

Based on what I'm reading I'm only 2 MB short of being able to use this backup. I've read I need atleast 40 MB free on the System Reserved Partition and I have 38 free. Anyone know how to clean this partion to possibly free up those last 2 MB I need?

 

That isn't how imaging works J8son. When you restore an image the computer is reset in its entirety to exactly how it was when the backup was created. You don't first have to reinstall Windows and then the rest of your stuff. Note that everything currently on you hard disk is overwritten during this process.

@plodr - we're at crossed purposes. Totally agree it is critical to have the rescue CD available for restoring an image of the system partition when the hard disk won't boot, but it isn't necessary to create the image using the CD. That works fine, and is a lot quicker, from Windows.