Take a backup image of a bootable hard drive, but not the blank space?


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Does anyone know the best way to take an image of a HDD, which contains all the partitions but doesn't use the full space of the drive - it ignores blank space?

 

I'm trying to create some recovery media for one of my servers, but there is no media from the OEM. The OEMs solution is to send out a preimaged hard drive that has the operating system and necessary extras preinstalled including a recovery partition. It's a royal pain, so I'd like to take an image that I can just reuse in future - and hopefully on larger disk sizes. 

 

As it's Server 2012R2, I'm going to have a look at the recovery partition and see if I can make my own proper recovery media (I'm waiting for delivery so not sure whether it will have everything needed) - but I want to make sure I have an image as a last resort before I start messing. If I have an image I can use on any HDD in future that would be even better.

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Aomei Backupper can do that. It can ignore blank space and it can also compress data.

 

My system HD is 120GB and it has around 90GB of data on it but the backup made with Backupper takes around 56GB.

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On 5/25/2017 at 10:12 AM, Xahid said:

CloneZilla can do it.

 

I second this. Highly recommend Clonezilla since it does require job quite nicely. It allows to image an entire drive or an each/one volume and store it on any local/NFS file system.

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Not to mention Acronis, and nearly every other program.

If I understand this correctly, you have a bootable drive, and only want to back up the part with data on it ?

They all do that.

if you have a 500GB drive with only 100GB on it - you are going to have a backup somewhere near or much less the 100GB, not the 500.

In fact, I dont know of any program which would backup blank space....

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I want to take the full layout of the drive (multiple partition drive - typical Windows OEM layout) then be able to restore it to any future drive so I don't have to go through the RMA process again. 

 

All I could think if at the time was a dd command in linux - I've almost never touched a proper imaging tool in the last 10 years - I completely forgot about them!

 

Hopefully, when the new drive comes I'll be able to make a proper Windows recovery image from it, but I want a disc image of the drive as a last resort.

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  • 2 months later...
On 5/28/2017 at 7:32 PM, Biohead said:

I want to take the full layout of the drive (multiple partition drive - typical Windows OEM layout) then be able to restore it to any future drive so I don't have to go through the RMA process again. 

 

All I could think if at the time was a dd command in linux - I've almost never touched a proper imaging tool in the last 10 years - I completely forgot about them!

 

Hopefully, when the new drive comes I'll be able to make a proper Windows recovery image from it, but I want a disc image of the drive as a last resort.

Funny you should ask this, yesterday I imaged my Windows 7 laptop (tried to upgrade it to Windows 10 and failed) when cloning and preparing the image, both the system partition and C:\ are selected by default in Macrium Reflect (Free Home use edition) so that is what I left it at. You'll want to restore the whole disk, so include the hidden partitions. 

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