Page 840 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

your entire hard drive, or your drive could die, and you’d be able to install a

new, empty one and be back in business inside of an hour.

It’s a good idea to make a fresh system image every few months, because
you’ll probably have installed new programs and changed your settings in
the interim.

Note
For the techies scoring at home, a system image is a .vhd file, the same kind that’s created by
Microsoft’s Virtual PC software—and, therefore, you can mount it using Virtual PC, if you like.

Make the Image

To make a system image, open the old Control Panel (type control pan into
the search box). Open “Backup and Restore (Windows 7).” Never mind
that “Windows 7” part—it still works in Windows 10.

Choose “Create a system image” (Figure 16-1, top); proceed as shown in
Figure 16-1.

No matter where you store the image, you’ll need a lot of empty disk space.
Not as much as your entire PC drive, because you won’t be backing up
empty space or temporary files. But a lot.

Note

You can keep multiple system images around—representing your PC’s world at different times—
if you back up to discs or hard drives. If you save to a network location, though, you can keep
only the most recent system image.