Before I started messing around with the touchscreen Motion LE1600 I wanted to create an image of it so I could resotre it to a known good state if I broke it. Normally I would either use the restore CD that ships with the device or an imaging product like Ghost32. Given that Motion shipped this to me with a Vista build that is a work in progress I was not surprised that a restore CD was not included. However Windows Vista includes a great new feature called CompletePC Backup and I thought I would check it out. I recorded the process to kick off a CompletePC Backup - here is the screencast (9MB - AVI format).
There are a couple of things that make this a really cool feature...
- You can create a PC image from within a running OS. Most other imaging software you need to boot of a floppy/CD/network to create the image while the dsk is not in use. CompletePC Backup uses volume shadow copy to allow you to image the machine "hot"
- The procedure is easy. This is going to be great for non-technical users. (the restore procedure is marginally harder but it is much more important that it is easy to create the image - users can always seek help to restore it if need be)
- Very fast - the first image I created took about 6 minutes. Subsequent images leverage the volume shadow copy snapshot and record changes, so should be even faster.
- Compact - the LE1600 is using about 11GB of disk - the backup is about 5.5GB on my USB hard drive.
- The format of the disk image is - get this - VHD, the same format as virtual disks in Microsoft's Virtual PC and Virtual Server products. In theory you are suppose to be able to add your CompletePC image to a virtual machine and boot it - how cool is that?!?! I have not tried that yet, but I will.
The backup files wizard looks pretty cool too. It leverages Windows Search and backs up files of the specified types where ever they sit on the PC. No more losing data because you forgot to include a folder. Again - great for the novice user.