How to Create & Restore a Windows System Image with Hasleo Backup Suite

Full system backups are vital for protecting your computer from total failure. Using Hasleo Backup Suite allows you to create a complete image of your Windows installation. This means you can restore your exact setup including all programs and settings if your drive fails.

Looking for a reliable, free alternative to expensive backup software? In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the Hasleo Backup Suite to create a complete system image of your Windows PC. A system image captures your entire environment—including the OS, programs, and files—allowing you to recover from total hardware failure or system corruption.

We walk through the differences between cloning, file-level backups, and system imaging. Watch as we set up a backup task, explore advanced options like encryption and scheduling, and perform a full restoration by booting into a WinPE recovery environment. We also show you a "pro tip" for mounting your backup as a virtual drive to recover individual files without a full restore!

Here is a writeup of the Hasleo Backup Suite backup process on our website.
https://onlinecomputertips.com/support-categories/software/create-and-restore-windows-image-backups/

0:00 - Introduction: System Image vs. File Level vs. Cloning
1:35 - Initial Setup and Choosing Your Default Backup Location
2:10 - Exploring Hasleo Backup Suite: System, Disk, and File Backup Modes
3:00 - Configuring a System Backup Task (Encryption & Compression)
4:53 - Restoring Your Windows System Image
7:00 - Entering the WinPE Recovery Environment
10:00 - Mounting an Image to Restore Individual Files

Here is a video showing how the OS cloning process works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQF-ufBnI8U

You can download the Hasleo Backup Suite software from here.
https://www.easyuefi.com/backup-software/backup-suite-free.html

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1 - Select Your Backup Type: Open Hasleo Backup Suite and go to the Backup tab. Choose System Backup to ensure all partitions required for Windows to boot are automatically selected.
2 - Choose Your Destination: Select a secondary internal drive or an external USB hard drive. Avoid saving the backup to your primary C: drive.
3 - Set Advanced Options (Optional):
* Compression: Choose between "Normal" or "High" to save space.
* Encryption: Add a password to protect your data.
* Schedule: Set the task to run weekly or monthly to keep your recovery point current.
4 - Create the Image: Click Proceed. The software will create a snapshot of your system. This process usually takes only a few minutes for modern SSDs.
5 - Restore Your System: If you need to revert, go to the Restore tab. Select your backup task and click Next. Confirm that you are restoring to the original partitions.
6 - Reboot into WinPE: Since you cannot overwrite Windows while it is running, Hasleo will prompt you to reboot into a WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment). The software will automatically build this for you and restart the PC.
7 - Complete the Restore: Once in the recovery environment, the restoration will begin automatically. When finished, the computer will reboot, and your system will be exactly as it was when the backup was made.
8 - Recover Individual Files: If you don't need a full restore, go to Tools - Mount Image. Select your backup and assign it a temporary drive letter (like Z:). You can now browse your backup in File Explorer and copy-paste specific files back to your desktop.

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Closed Caption:

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hi in this video we're going to show you
how to create a system image backup of
your computer using a free program
called hasleo backup Suite so a system
image backup is different than a file
level backup or a clone so file level
backup will backup your files
individually and then a clone will clone
the drive let's say you wanted to maybe
upgrade to a bigger drive or your drive
is failing you could clone your drive to
that new drive with Windows uh your
programs and your files and then you can
make it bootable so you could just
continue on with the larger or new drive
so a system image backup will take a
snapshot so to say of your system at
that particular point in time so
whatever date and time you create the
backup that is what's going to be
captured so if you restore it your
computer is going to be reverted back to
that date and time so anything you do
after you create this system image
backup will not be there if you restore
the system image backup so it's always a
good idea to do maybe multiples or to do
this in addition to file level backup so
you could use your file level backups
for you know if you need to restore a
file or you deleted something on
accident and then you could use the
system image backup in case your
computer you know completely dies or you
have a hardware failure because when
that happens all you need to do is
reinstall Windows reinstall the backup
software and then restore your image
assuming your image file didn't get
corrupted and is on a different Drive in
a safe location okay so we're going to
run the program here so after you
install it the first time you run it
it's going to ask you to specify a
default backup location you don't have
to do that but if you want to do that
you could do so on this
computer we're doing on this Data Drive
and backups so I already have a backup
image that I created earlier so we're
going to do a new one here
so we'll open the
program all right so here's the one I
made earlier so we're going to go to the
backup section here so you have your
system backup which is what we're going
to do uh you could do a disc or
partition backup that'll back up the
drive or partition let's say you want to
back it up to another drive just to have
a copy of it and then you could do file
level
backups and then here's restore section
we'll get to and then here's the Clone
option here so if you want to clone
Windows to another drive you could do
this so we did a video on how this works
so I'll put a link in the description if
you want to check that out and you could
also just clone a disc if you want to
make a copy of a disc it won't be
bootable unless you use this option here
and if you have multiple partitions on a
disc you could clone a specific
partition all right so going back to the
system backup we're going to click on
that okay so it automatically picked the
windows drive with all of the windows
partitions
selected and here's my backup drive here
and the destination is in backup so you
could name the task you could give it a
description so let's just call
this new C Drive backup and you have a
bunch of options if you want to go
through all these how much compression
if you want to do file splitting
retention
policy if you want to put a password on
it for encryption
uh you can run some commands pre and
post backup send an email notification
when it's done this is probably
something that you use more for
scheduling than you know a one-time job
here then you have some Advanced options
here if you want to look into that and
then you could also schedule the backup
so if you want to do this on a regular
basis maybe once or twice a month you
could schedule the job and decide what
type of backup you know full incremental
differential and retain the first backup
and how long you want to keep each
one so that's up to
you okay so we're going to be doing new
C Drive backup to our backups folder and
the description we'll just leave as is
and we'll click on
proceed all right so when it's completed
you could have it do
nothing check the image do nothing
reboot shut down and that type of
thing okay so this will take several
minutes so I will pause the video and
then be back when it's
done all right so the backup is
completed only took about 3 minutes so
we're going to click on finish all right
so now I'm going to make a new file on
the desktop
here call this after backup so now what
we're going to do is restore this image
and then when we restore the image this
file should be gone because it was
created after the backup so to restore
we're going to go to the restore section
here then we're going to either select a
task to restore or browse to an image
either one will work so if I go task we
could see there's the one we
made or if I do image then I'd have to
browse to the
image which is right here so either one
will work so do this you see it's not
scheduled you see when it was made it
was successful so we'll click on
next okay so here's what it's going to
restore here
we can see we have all of our
partitions you can see it's set to
system mode that's what we want because
it's a system level backup not a
partition mode or a file
mode all right so we have the summary
here so here are all the
partitions and we're going to restore to
the original location we're not going to
restore to a different Drive we're going
to overwrite Windows with this new one
here so we'll have this box
checked click on next
and this section here you probably want
to leave alone you could resize the uh
drive and partition if you need to do so
but for our purposes we're just going to
leave it as is click on proceed so it's
saying all data on selected partitions
will be destroyed so like I said before
once you restore this anything you've
done after this system image will be
wiped out and replaced with this system
image from whatever date and time you
created it so we're going to say yes so
if you have
any FES that were created after this
image that you want to save you should
back this up before doing this process
assuming your computer is in any running
condition to do
so and then we have the options here for
after it restores we're going to pick
reboot because we want to reboot back
into our old backup
here all right so now you can see it
needs to reboot into preos mode to
continue because you can't restore
Windows while Windows is running so
we're going to click
continue so it needs to create a win PE
image to continue say yes to this so if
you need to add any drivers you could do
so but we don't need to do so in our
situation because everything's the
same all right so it's building the PE
image right now so this will take a
couple
minutes all right so now it's going to
restart start the computer into the winp
mode so we could actually do the
restore all right so it looks like it's
loading windows but it's not
all right so now it's doing the restore
process and then of course once again
you could change your options here as to
what happens
afterwards all right so this is going to
take several minutes as well so we will
be back when this is
finished all right the computer is now
going to reboot since the restore
process is complete
[Music]
all right so we're logging back in
all right so you can see we're back in
Windows and that file we created is gone
which tells us that we have restored the
computer back to that previous backup
before that file was
created now we could open the program
again and now you can see we still have
our two backups there so we could go
back to this one again if we need to or
go back to an older one if we need to
then if you click on actions
here you could back it up again restore
it merge an image mount an image check
your image to make sure it's legitimate
edit it delete it open the
location and so
on and then the program also has some
other tools here in the
toolbox so this is a nice one for
example if you want to mount an image of
your backup
let's say this old one
here so let's say we want to do our main
C drive
here let say let's put it all the way
down to Z for example because we can't
use C obviously because that's being
used by
Windows all right so now when we open up
file
explorer go to this PC you can see we
have our Z drive here with the backup
image mount
wanted and then we could actually just
go through the files if we wanted
to let's say we wanted to restore
something or just copy something over
from the image without having to
actually restore the entire image we
could just drag it out to our desktop
for example so this is a really nice way
to actually use your system image to
actually restore file or maybe get an
older version of a file let's say you
deleted it and you had it in your image
backup you could go back and get it
then when you're
done you just select it unmount
it let's go back to the tools real quick
here then you have some other options
here to merge your images check your
images like we saw before wipe a drive
if you want to do
that use some logs and so
on May you have some other data recovery
software if you want to check it out or
portable Windows Creator tool you can
check
out all right so overall you can see
it's a pretty nice program especially
for being
free so once again you could do the
system image backup like we just did uh
dis and partition backups and file level
backups all right so I'll put a link in
the description where you can download
as Leo backup suite and then you could
try it out for yourself all right thanks
for watching and be sure to subscribe
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