Windows 10 offers many facilities for creating backups. On the one hand it keeps the tools that were implemented in Windows 8, while on the other it recovers the function of creating backups of Windows 7. This gives the user a good range of options to create backups.

On the one hand you can create backups of individual files and restore previous versions of these files, on the other you can save specific folders with all their contents and finally you can create a complete backup of the operating system, which is what we Let’s focus on this article.

Earlier we talked about how to create automatic backups using the file history of Windows 10, but what we are going to propose in this article is that you can restore your system as it was in case of a serious failure.

Some things to keep in mind

When preparing a backup of the entire operating system, we have to avoid several things: junk files and malware, so we have to follow a series of steps before doing it.

  • First, we would have to perform a thorough cleanup with a program like CCleaner or System Ninja to remove any trace of useless information.
  • Continuing with the theme of “lightening” the backup, we uninstalled all the programs that we no longer use.
  • We end up with a health check of the computer passing an antivirus, which we then complete with an antimalware like RogueKiller, which we talked about in our article on infections with bitcoin miners.

Once these three points are completed, we can now prepare the restore copy of the operating system.

Creating the Backup

The method we are going to use to create the backup has a major difference with respect to automatic backups: here all files and folders, not just those we specify, such as documents and libraries, will be stored here.

Another interesting feature is that it can be saved locally on the hard drive. It is not necessary to insert an external unit, provided that we have the necessary capacity for it. Having said all this, we can already create an image of the system that will serve as backup.

First open the Control Panel by right-clicking on the Start menu.

There, under the section “Backup and Restore”, we will see in the left part of the window the option “Create system image”.

An image authoring wizard will then appear. In the first window we will have to select the hard disk where it will be saved, and in the second we will be informed of which partitions will be copied, as well as the size that can occupy the copy.

From here, we will have the backup created. When something fails we can use it to restore it whenever necessary, which we can do from a means of installing Windows 10 or from the operating system itself.