Making your first Backup

In the event that your hard drive which your operating system is stored on becomes unavailable
(I am assuming it is your Drive C: ), it would stand to reason that the backup image you take of
your operating system; exist on a separate disk drive (such as Drive E:,etc) to enable you to
have a reliable backup you can use to recovery your system.

My suggestion is to go and buy an external USB hard drive (Maxtor brand is one of my
favorites) from your local computer store such as BestBuy, and attach it to your PC. When
picking the size of hard drive you need to buy, try and make it 3 times bigger then your Drive C:
. For instance, if the Drive C: is 80 GB, try and locate a 240GB drive. I suggest this, because
having the extra space will allow you to keep multiple versions of backup images if you ever
need to rely on a previous version for recovery. As I said earlier in the System Requirements
you could also buy an internal hard drive or even store your image on a network drive, but for
the sake of this tutorial, we will be using an external USB hard drive to store our backup images
(which will be referred to as Drive E: ).

Finally, I highly recommend that your external drive use an NTFS filesystem, rather then a
FAT32 based filesystem. If you are unsure if you have an NTFS filesystem or wish to
understand how to convert to an NTFS filesystem, please refer to the Converting to NTFS
section.

Once you have confirmed your external drive is using NTFS, double click the DriveImage XML
icon located on your desktop to launch the application (click screenshot to enlarge):

On the Welcome screen, in the
lower right hand corner click
Backup
On the Backup screen, you will
be asked to pick the drive letter
you wish to back up. Single click
the
C: drive and click Next
On the Welcome screen for the
Backup Wizard, click on
Next
You are then prompted to select
a destination for your backup
image.
Browse to your E:
drive (note your drive letter may
be different. In my example, my
drive letter is E: ) and click
OK.
Unclick the Split files option,
click
Compressed option and
ensure
Try Volume Shadow
Services first
is selected. Click
on
Next
DriveImage XML will begin the
backup process. Depending on
the size of your C: drive, you may
have to wait anywhere from
several minutes to several hours.
Once your backup is finished,
click
Finish
Congratulations, you have made your first backup with DriveImage XML !
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