First, a quick review of creating a hard drive partition is demonstrated. To begin, go to Start > Right-click Computer > Manage. Or, enter computer into the run and search box and select Computer Management from the available options.

Click on Storage > Disk Management. Choose the drive that you want to partition. In this example, there is only one hard drive to choose. It is a 1TB hard drive with an NTFS files system and plenty of space to allow for a significant partition if necessary.

Here, the amount of shrink space entered is 100,000 MB, or 100 GB. This is a decent size for a VHD and it can be altered in the future. Click Shrink when done.

Select this unallocated space and right-click and choose New Simple Volume. The setup Wizard will appear. Follow the steps and fill in the partition size. You should see the VHD listed when you double-click Computer. In this example, it is named “Archive”.

Now that the VHD image has been created and named, the next step is to choose the data to backup. You may drag and drop as many files as the space will allow. With a partition of this size, a large amount of data can be stored over time. The computer used in this example shares data with other PCs on a remote network. Using Windows 7 Backup and Restore, you can backup all data on the PC easily and save yourself the trouble of dragging and dropping.

Backup to Virtual Hard Drive

To use the new VHD for a complete Backup and Restore, follow these steps:

Open the Control Panel and choose System and Security. Click “Back up your computer”. You will then see this option:

Select Options in the Check backup settings then click Change Backup Settings and you will see this window representing all drives. Select the new VHD as the backup Volume by clicking on it and then click Next.

Notice that Windows 7 warns that this drive is on the physical disk as your system drive. This warning is there because this is not the ideal space for a final backup. It is rather easy to transfer the data from the VHD to an external hard drive at a later time as often as needed.

To select specific documents, rather than a full backup, highlight “Let me choose”. To allow a full backup, highlight “Let Windows choose”.

You can set a schedule for the backup to occur at regular intervals but always be sure to make a final backup on an external hard drive. On a network this is particularly useful. You can, for example, backup a shared network folder on a weekly basis and ensure that shared network files are continually backed up. Set it any way you like.

Gizmo Drive (via Lee at Download Squad) is yet another tool to mount CD and DVD images in Windows. It can mount ISO, BIN, CUE, MDS, MDF, NRG and VHD images which are essentially the most popular image formats. Images can be mounted using the shell in Windows Explorer, the command line or the graphical user interface.

Gizmo Drive can mount as many CD, ISO or Virtual Hard Drive images as there are free drive letters available. Each image can be remounted during Windows Startup or write protected so that the data does not get changed.

It is also possible to create new ISO images with some interesting features besides being able to mount existing images. Gizmo Drive can create virtual hard drive images, ISO images from disc and virtual hard drives that reside in RAM and act as a RAM drive. The virtual hard drives can be compressed and encrypted for additional security.

The drive mounting software has a surprisingly low resource usage when minimized in the Windows System Tray with less than four Megabytes of computer memory total. Make sure you only check the GDrive option during setup unless you want to install other programs as well.