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Does Windows 7 System Image Backup Compress to as little as 33%?

Windows 7 prompted me that my system image could take up to 28 Gigs, which makes sense since that's the size of my C: Drive. However, somehow my entire system image fit onto two DVDs (4.7 gigs each, for a total of 9.4 gigs.) How can that be possible? Is this not trully a system image, simply an image of windows operating system software? I know that I could test this with a restore, but I don't want to test it and lose my programs. If the system image is of only the operating system +drivers & updates, that's not good enough for me. I was hoping to have my ENTIRE drive imaged.

Thank you in advance for your time.

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Answer

I appreciate that you took the time to attempt to answer my question, but I think you misunderstood me. Yes, I have freshly installed windows 7, but I have also installed MS office suite and a few other programs + personal files, so I now have 28 GBs of USED space on my hard drive. Hence, windows warned that my system image could take up to 28 GBs of space. Yet the image fit on only two DVDs, or just 9.4 gbs, which I found suspicious.

Sure enough, tried the system image again on my new external hard drive, and it used 18 gb of space. That seems more like it. Compression from 28 gbs to 18 gbs seems much more reasonable than 28 gbs to 9 gbs.

For others, I reccommend always backing up on an external. Besides the fact that windows 7 seems to like that better, the other benefit is that you can boot of a system repair disk (or windows install disk) and then load your system image from the external. (With your system image on a cd drive, you can't do both unless you have two optical drives.)

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Last updated January 15, 2023 Views 11,303 Applies to: