Hello guys,

Is there a way to clone a complete installation of Windows 7 x64 on a USB stick ?
(to be used as a backup and restore the win7 installation when needed on the same pc)

- The only installed software is MS Office, Photoshop CS6 and a few system utilityes... no daws or plugins

The size of the installation is about 100 Gb on a WD Black 1 TB Drive, and the stick is a SanDisk 128 Gb Ultra Flair

If Yes could someone write down in a few steps the procedure and what software is best for the task please ?

 

yer just use acronis and clone the drive to usb, or use other free cloning, its very simple to do as long as the usb is big enough then acronis will clone it, do you mean make an image backup? i dont think you meant cloning in the true sense, but yes you can backup your c drive with acronis to a usb stick, if you have a WD drive you can dl the home version of acronis for free, its what i use, only today i did a proper clone, cloned my samsung 860 evo 500gb to a samsung evo 860 1tb no probs

 

I actually need something to be able to restore my windows 7x64 installation when I mess up the system, without having to go through the installation and tuning oh windows itself...

In other words this is what I need:

1. messed up my installation
2. boot with the linux usb
3. create a new partition table on my messed C drive and format to ntfs
4. reboot to some backup software boot usb and restore the previously created "copy" of the drive from a 128 Gb usb stick, back to the freshly formatted C drive

- so the question is, what software to use that allows to make such a backup and to be able to make a bootable media from which I can access my backup and restore the drive

- the backup itself should reside on a 128 Gb usb stick
- the bootable media should be a 1 Gb usb stick

Now, for the backup itself, I am not sure what is the appropriate name for it... clone, image, backup, mirror... anyway, I hope You get the point I hope... the perfect copy of my C drive when windows was freshly installed an I added a few needed utilities.

 

https://www.easeus.com/landing/seo/clone-hard-drive-to-usb.html

Create a clone of your OS drive to the USB using EaseUS, if your HDD fails you would just get a new drive, and use the image on the USB to restore to your new drive, and it will boot up and have all your programs and stuff that you had when you created the image.

 

why not use the original tools? here's some insight:
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

 

@tzzsmk the OS doesn't give me the possibility to choose my USB stick to use it as a media for a system image.

Now trying with acronis... it goes, but very slow, despite being a USB3 150 Mb/s stick.

...if it fails, I'll go with EaseUS

 

EaseUS as mentioned I'm pretty sure can do it, information here:
https://www.easeus.com/backup-recovery/clone-hard-drive-to-usb-flash-drive.html

I'm not sure if the free version does it but I'm sure EaseUS Partition Master Technican Edition does it.
If you are short of money there is a nice "free" copy of it on the net called:
EASEUS Partition Master 12.5 Technican Edition + Crack [CracksNow]
I use that program regularly, but I have never cloned to usb just to a HDD and SSD.
Of course using USB to clone is not ideal because of transfer speed, but since it's only 100GB you are okay. If I had used USB to clone my 2TB hard drive it would have taken weeks. Not sure if a 2TB USB exist... probably not

 

Last edited: Dec 5, 2018

tanks @Daskeladden

I have the 10 version of Partition master... will check later if it can do the job if Acronis fails