We showed you a while ago how to create a custom refresh image that keeps all your installed programs. And to use this image to restore your Windows 8 computer, you will need to go to PC Settings, Update and recovery, Recovery, and choose Remove everything and reinstall Windows. Not a very straight and easy to use approach.

Here comes a much better one, RecImg Manager is a free utility that offers a new way for users to back up and restore their entire Windows 8 system and software in minutes without losing any personal data. Brought to you by SlimWare Utilities, RecImg Manager works on any devices that run Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. However, Windows RT is not included.

RecImg Manager has an elegantly designed user interface. It runs in full-screen mode, and comes with only 2 options, Backup & Restore, when started.

Creating Backup image is easy. You don’t need to use the command line anymore. All you need is to follow the 3-step instruction displayed on the screen, select the destination drive, describe the snapshot details, and click the green Backup Now button to start. Depending on how many programs you have installed, the backup process could take a while to finish.

When performing a restore, RecImg Manager first scans the system to see if there are any active recovery images available on the system, and will list all of them when discovered. You can select the image you want to restore and press the green Restore button to start the recovery process. You can also edit the details of any image files or remove them if you don’t need them anymore.

As you can see from the above screenshot, it didn’t list the images I manually created using RecImg command line. If you do have those, you can click Browse button to manually add those images to the list, like below.

It’s always a good practice having a good backup before when needed. Therefore, to keep your hassle free and avoid having to reinstall from scratch because you don’t have a good backup to restore from, you need to periodically back up your system, either using RecImg command line, or better, setting up a backup schedule in RecImg Manager. To do so, click the Gear icon at the top right corner of the program, and enable Automatically record new snapshot with a workable schedule, either daily, weekly, or even monthly.

Verdict

RecImg Manager has a superb front-end interface, works like a champ, and comes with a price everyone loves. If you have jumped onto Windows 8 wagon, and have become quite like it, let’s make RecImg Manager be part of it.