Hello all, I am currently using Macrium Reflect V6 Free and I love it but I would like to have the ability to backup to a "Hidden drive" (A drive without a drive letter)
Does anyone know if Macrium Reflect with a license can do this or any other backup software bought or free?
There's a difference in thinking when it comes to backup software and imaging software. Backup software allows you to separate your data from the operating system to always keep your data accessible. Imaging software focuses on the OS+configuration+programs This difference is important because it allows you to figure out what exactly you want to do since software tends to be designed for either one or the other. User-level software blurs the difference sometimes.
An OS "backup" is called an OS image and OEMs usually pre-load a recovery partition containing that image so users can boot via a cd, menu option, usb or w/e and recover their computer. This typically requires the hard disk partitioned in a certain way and so is really only easy to implement when installing windows for the first time.
1) I do this manually with the DISM tool and creating the partitions manually but this other tool published by this awesome french guy does it for free but requires the disk partitioned a certain way (so "requires" an OS reinstall).
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/21978-OEM-Factory-recovery-image-creator-for-Windows
2) The idea behind Macrium is to bundle both your data and the os together and then restore it later.
The old version of Macrium Reflect that used a linux boot cd instead of windows PE supported this explicitly. When they switched to winpe, the "newer" pe version didn't support the oem-style recovery scenario of a hidden partition on the same drive so I stopped using it. I'm not sure if the newer versions added this feature back. Try it!
3) Another option is that certain versions of windows have a "Windows Image Backup" tool (in the Backup and Restore center, or File History for Win8) that allows you to create a system image.
So just shrink your hd's main partition with diskpart/disk management
Create a new one with the empty space
Run the "create system image" wizard
Create the backup image
"hide" the partition (by remove the drive letter)
(optional) set gpt/partition id attributes if you want to be all fancy about it
create a system repair disk (so winre.wim in iso format basically)
Then just insert the diskette whenever you want to go back.
With the existing windows image backup tool, even though it won't use all of it, the partition you create needs to be the same size as the existing used space. It's overly picky~
There's also a lot of non-free commercial variants. The idea is they automate a lot of what you'd have to do manually.
Okay so I just tested this product on Win7x64. It looks like they added support for same-disk partitions again so you have the green light to use the free version of Macrium to create your hidden partition.
I created the partition myself obviously and hid it. No way I'm trusting 3rd party software to do that personally, and the restore process is very cryptic (have to select the image manually), so I'd test the process out in a VM to make sure you're comfortable doing it.
Just uncheck all but the partition you'd like to create an image of and select "image this partition".