Still using the ghost? 200MB will be able to back up Vista.

Microsoft's Vista system brings us a different operating experience, and there are some annoying things. The most typical problem is how to back up the vista system. Although the full backup feature is available in Vista, the system disk backup can be used to generate mirrored files, but the volume is too large. Backing up Vista with tools such as Ghost is not only large in size, but is often prone to unknown problems. Is there a perfect solution? Look at only 200MB space, how to complete the Vista backup!

200MB backup Vista's "Secret"
Vista just installed, occupy the hard disk space around 8GB, with Vista with full backup function, the resulting mirror file has 6GB, and ghost compressed backup generated mirrored files have 3GB.
In fact, we use Microsoft's Vista system installation files to backup can achieve unexpected results. There is a "install.wim" file in the Vista installation CD that encapsulates 7 versions of Vista, but takes up only 2.15GB of space (Figure 1).

Figure 1

This is because the Vista installation disc uses a special ImageX mirroring method, so the compression ratio is very high. And our hard disk installation of the Vista system program, the large number of files are released from the "Install.wim" file, encapsulated in the "Install.wim" file, duplicate files will not occupy the extra space. Therefore, we can complete the hard drive Vista System package backup into the Vista installation file "Install.wim", will not occupy more than 200MB of hard disk space!

Second, the extraction of Vista image files
If you have Vista installation CD-ROM, you can directly copy the "Install.wim" file, but most users are downloaded from the Internet Vista installation CD-ROM image files, so you need to use the UltraISO tool to extract files from. This assumes that Vista system is installed in D disk, now to the Vista system in the D disk for a full backup, so the WIM file storage path is: "C:install.wim."

Small tip:
"Install.wim" files should be stored on a non-Vista system disk, and the hard disk free space should be above 2.5G for a full backup.

Run UltraISO (click to download), click on the menu "file" → "open", browse to select the Vista installation CD image ISO file. After loading the virtual optical drive, in UltraISO open the "SOURCES" folder under the root of the installation CD image file, right-click the "INSTALL." WIM file, select the extract to command in the pop-up menu, and then specify the save path to start extracting the file (Figure 2). Because the file is a bit large, the processing time may be longer.