When you need to revive Windows 10 from system image recovery but find it's useless, you may be very upset. Thus, many users may want to validate if the backup task is successful. Just like the user below:
"A couple of days ago I took a system image backup of Windows 10 to a 3TB drive - something unsupported in Windows 7 because of the 4k segment size. At least I think I took a backup - it did something for a long time. But I just looked at it and Windows says it's 0 bytes long. Is there any way to know whether I actually have a backup short of trying to restore it?"
As a computer user, you may know that it is necessary to create a system image in Windows 10. Because it can help you revive your computer when something bad happens, such as system crashes, disk failure, virus attack, etc. But is it over?
The answer is NO. You need to verify Windows 10 backup image, which ensures you can successfully revive Windows 10 from system image recovery. Actually, there are many situations that can cause your backup image invalid. For example, if the hard drive where you stored data is scratched, the backup image might be damaged. When your backup image file has been damaged, you cannot restore from it successfully.
Well, is there a convenient way to validate if a system image backup is valid without actually doing a restore? Definitely yes! You can mount the backup image with a reliable backup software and then check it.
To validate a Windows 10 system backup image, here we highly recommend a reliable backup and restore software - Qiling Disk Master Standard. You can use its Check Image feature to make sure your backup images are intact during or after creating a system image or other backup images, so you can successfully restore data from the backup images. To be specific, it can do the following things for you:
Besides the Check Image feature, Qiling Disk Master offers many other useful features to help you manage your backup tasks easily.
Here you will use Qiling Disk Master Standard to verify Windows 10 backup image. And it also applies to Windows 11/8/7/XP/Vista. You have two ways in the following:
Verify backup image during the backup process: If you don't create a system image with this software, it will be a great choice to do this during the backup process.
Check system image after the backup task is complete: If you have already created a system image with this software, you still can check backup image separately.
Before starting, please download this software and install it on your Windows 10. For server users, please try Qiling Disk Master Server.
Step 1. Open Qiling Disk Master, click Backup and System Backup. Then, it will select Windows 10 OS and boot-related partitions required to boot Windows 10 by default.
Step 2. Click where the arrow points and select a destination path to store the backup image. You can backup Windows 10 to external hard drive, USB flash drive, NAS, network location, etc.
Step 3. Click Proceed to create a system image in Windows 10. After the backup process starts, you will see the Avanced buttion, click it and tick Check backup integrity on completion. It will check backup image file after completing the backup and ensure you can successfully restore it.
Step 1. Launch Qiling Disk Master and select Check Image. You have two ways in the following:
Go to Backup tab, choose system backup task and click the Advanced > Check Image.
Step 2. It will show you the backup image check progress in the following screenshot. If there is no problem, click Finish.
You have learned how to validate a Windows 10 system backup image with the help of free backup software - Qiling Disk Master Standard. And it provides you with 2 different ways to check backup image files, namely, using "Check backup integrity on completion" feature during the backup process, and "Check Image" tool after the backup is complete. Pitch one of them to check backup image now!