There are so many things that could mess up your Windows installation and make it impossible for your to boot into Windows. Malware infection, power outage, hard disk failure and so many other things can cause this. Fortunately, there are so many freeware tools that can help you restore your Windows installation in only a few minutes without you having to reinstall Windows from scratch. Macrium Reflect is such a tool and offers many features like disk image backup and restore, Windows PE recovery and more.
The backup of Windows installation simply means creating the image backup of the partition on which you have installed Windows. So if you have installed Windows on C:, then Macrium Reflect will create an image backup of C: partition. This is why it is suggested that you create the image backup soon after installing Windows, configuring it to your personal preferences and installing some of the basic software.
Macrium Reflect shows the option to create an image of the system partition clearly with a Windows logo. You can click on this button with Windows logo to proceed. The same option is also available from the menubar. In the next step you have to choose a folder where you want to save the backup image.
There are so many other settings using which you can customize the backup process, but the default options work flawlessly for most of the users. The backup process itself takes less than 10 minutes and uses the volume shadow service (VSS) to backup all the files from the system partition even when they are in use. In my case, it took only 9 minutes to backup a system partition with files of total size 9.8 GB and created a backup file of only 4.8 GB.
Later if you want to restore this image, then you have to go to the Restore section in Macrium Reflect, select a backup image and click on Restore Image. Just like the backup, the restore process is also completed smoothly and without any problems.
Conclusion: Backing up system image can be useful in the case of malware infections or disk failures. Using Macrium Reflect, you can quickly create a full backup of your system partition and restore it any time later. The process is very fast and hassle free.
You can download Macrium Reflect from http://www.macrium.com/.