I have a Dell XPS 8500 running Windows 8 and want to create a system image backup, and am running into much frustration.
My first attempt was to use the Microsoft Windows File Recovery “create a system image” option. This tries to backup of the “EFI System Partition”, “OS C:”, and “WINRETOOLS” partitions. Unfortunately the Dell WINRETOOLS partition is 500 MB in size with 229 MB free and Windows requires 320 MB of free space on partitions 500MB or more (but only 50 MB on partitions smaller than 500 MB) to initiate a volume shadow copy snapshot. I read that some people had success using Partition Wizard to reduce the size of the partition down to 490 MB and thus only require 50 MB of free space, but I don’t know if I would trust doing this to my system, at least not without a good system backup as I am not sure if Dell requires the partitions to be laid out the way they are to function or to have a system image restore function correctly.
Then I thought I found an answer, the “Dell Backup and Recovery” program. By what I read, if I upgrade to the Premium version I can create full system backups. But unfortunately when I try to run Dell Backup and Recovery with my external USB drive connected (a Western Digital My Book 4 TB drive - 3,725.99 GB) the backup program gets stuck on the screen with the clock and rotating hands. I left my system like this overnight to see if it would eventually get by this screen, but the next day it was still stuck.
I disconnected the USB hard disk and connected a 16GB USB flash drive and tried to create a Rescue Disk, but the Dell Backup and Recovery program wanted a USB hard drive, not a USB flash drive so that didn’t work either. So I thought I would see if the Dell Backup and Recovery program would work with an old 320 GB USB drive that I had. The program started fine (although a bit slow with that rotating clock hands screen). I was able to create a Rescue Disk on it without a problem. Kind of waste of a drive which is much larger than needed for a rescue disk but smaller than needed for a system backup.
So why would Dell Backup and Recovery hang on startup when I have my 4 TB drive connected? Is there a bug in the software when large drives are connected? I could disconnect the drive, open the software to get past the rotating clock screen, then plug in the drive and do a backup. But would this work for manual or scheduled system backups if I upgrade to premium? Would this work with system restores? What strange thing is going on when the rotating clock screen is displayed before the main window of the Dell Backup and Recovery system appears?
I am not feeling very comfortable without being able to run a system backup and don’t want to upgrade to premium if it won’t work correctly with my external hard drive.