Shrinking a hard drive image

[Dominus Atheos]

I'm trying to take a backup image of my hard drive, but it's 276GBs. I don't feel like moving stuff off before hand and then putting it back since that would take several hours and be very labor intensive. Are there any hard drive imaging programs that allow you to remove files from the image to reduce it's size?

Windows 7 x64

[adam_grif]

This isn't going to be very helpful, but 1 TB hard drives are cheaper than dirt these days.

[Dragon Angel]

If I remember right, Norton's Ghost SHOULD have an image explorer that allows you to browse through images. Whether or not it can delete files from them, though, I am not certain.

However, I hear the quality of Ghost has dropped...rather significantly, within the past few years.

[Thanas]

I for one would not advise you to manually tinker with images. I always leave my images alone after they are done.

[Dragon Angel]

Whether or not it can delete files from them, though, I am not certain.

After a little bit of Googling, I found out that it IS possible with the latest versions of Ghost's Explorer, but the same searches seem to agree with Thanas: It's a calculated risk.

Take from it what you will. I happen to agree with Thanas as well - editing an image's file structure, which must be very precise, can be a risky venture.

[Starglider]

Why are you trying to take a low-level image of the drive in the first place? DXIII mentioned file-level backups; that class of software is usually a better idea as it can do incremental backups, vastly speeding up the process and giving you rolling backups / version history at minimal storage cost. Low-level images are mainly a convenience for applications where space is not a concern, e.g. maintaining a consistent OS image across many PCs in an organisation.

[Dominus Atheos]

I'm trying to take a backup image so if anything really bad happens to my computer, I can restore the whole thing with programs and settings. Is there another program that can do that?

[Starglider]

I'm trying to take a backup image so if anything really bad happens to my computer, I can restore the whole thing with programs and settings. Is there another program that can do that?

Copying all the files is sufficient for that. The only thing that a straight file copy won't include is the boot block, and most decent backup software has special handling for that (or in a pinch you can just reinstall windows, then delete and replace the clean install with your backed up files).

[Dragon Angel]

I'm trying to take a backup image so if anything really bad happens to my computer, I can restore the whole thing with programs and settings. Is there another program that can do that?

What you want to do, is to create a point where all the computer's software, settings, files, etc. is all saved into one backup, right?

This (free) program works fine for that purpose, but it requires a little bit of Linux knowledge: CloneZilla.

Be warned, though, you will probably need a sizable external device to hold whatever images you create, unless you have another drive installed on your computer. Also this may seem obvious, but any data files that you have saved on the drive to be imaged - be they text documents, pictures, spreadsheets... - will be erased and reset upon the restore (not backup) imaging's completion. I recommend defragging and checking your drive for file system errors before backing up, too, for best chances of having a solid image.