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Can vista do the same things as whs

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alanwest09872 said:
I've never understood what a virtual disk is. Now what I think you are saying is that it will make a copy of your computer and you can copy and paste needed files from that. Am I correct or way off base
Click to expand...

When you create a virtual machine, you have a virtual hard drive. It's a single file on the host computer, but when mounted in a virtual machine it has the same directory structure any OS install would have. So yeah... it's kinda like an ISO I guess, but more robust I guess you could say.

When Vista or Win7 do a full image backup, they create a virtual hard disk image. Vista and Win7 have the ability to read the VHD file and let you restore individual files without mounting it in a virtual machine, but you can.

You can even boot a virtual machine from that VHD file, although it will require reinstalling tons of drivers on first boot because virtual machines have pretty generic emulated hardware. It would be like taking a hard drive from one computer and installing it in another - possible, but there's the possibility that some things won't work properly but you should at least be able to get it to boot so you can access data that you may need.

Really all you need to know about Vista/Win7 image backups is that they're complete images of the hard drive (right down to the boot manager I believe) unlike previous versions of Windows. So if you restore the image, it's in the EXACT same state that it was in when the backup was created.

In addition to full image backups, you can do incremental backups, and restoring those works the same way as long as the original image backup still exists (you haven't deleted it).
 
Win7 stores its system image backups in the .VHD format. VHD is just a file format designed to hold the entire content of a storage volume inside a single file. You can view (and copy) the content with a working copy of Win7 or Server 2008 R2. There are separate viewers, too.

A Win7 system image backup works like this:

It originally creates a VHD file that has the entire content of, at least, the critical system volumes.

If you run a later system image backup to the same disk, it puts the latest content into the "full" system image backup and moves older backup version content to separate files. When the backup location gets low on space, the older versions of the backup are deleted.

You can restore a full system backup by booting to a Win7 Install DVD or the special "Recovery Disk" you can create, telling it you want to "Repair My Computer", and pointing the restoration routines at the .VHD backup file location. Initially, it'll only show the .VHD that has the most recent versions of everything, but you can ask it to show you a list of previous backups, too.
 
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sorry I didnt respond sooner lol Didint relize there was a second page. Thanks for the help. Virtual Hard disk acutally makes some sense now lol. And If all I have to do is create the backup then I can reload it with the install disk or recovery disk knowing this will help when it comes time to reinstall. And knowing me that will be in the next month or so lol
 
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