WimLibScripts is a collection of PowerShell scripts to backup and restore entire Windows volumes. It uses PowerShell to query all required settings and perform checks, and the excellent open source library WimLib to perform the actual backup and restore task.
The scripts can easily be configured to run fully interactively with file selection dialogs, interactive but strictly text based, or fully automated with preset parameters.
Over the years, I had used Acronis TrueImage, DriveImage XML, Norton GhostImage, and the Windows 7 built-in backup, none of which fully satisfied me. So I stumbled over several articles that describe the features of WimLib, which exploits the WIM file format that is also used by Microsoft to bundle its software releases.
- the WimLib library is rock solid and reliably creates and restores images.
- it is very space efficient. An image consumes only about a third of the space used by the files on the volume.
- it skips well-known space hoggers, like
pagefile.sys,swapfile.sys, orSystem Volume Information, among others. - it adds additional images as differential changes to the WIM file. So the size of the WIM file only increases by about a third of the size of the modified files.
- it is very CPU efficient. While compressing the file data in parallel, it used all of my four cores to 99%.
- the generated WIM file can easily be browsed and extracted using the free 7-Zip archiver (version 16.04 or newer).
Since the web pages I found merely describe the steps to manually issue a backup and how to restore an image, I wrote these scripts to make this a regular, easy and less error prone task.
For an explanation of the scripts, see the Manual.
Copyright (c) 2017 Dr. Frank Heimes
See the License file for license rights and limitations (MIT).
Plaudits 😏, feature requests, and constructive comments are highly appreciated. Since I'm using the scripts myself, I will continue to maintain them.