How do you back up the disks?

How Large are Windows 7 Recovery Disks?

• I'm very egar to try out the Win 8 Consumer Preview, but I've read online that once it's installed, the only way to downgrade back to Win 7 is via recovery disks. This is fine and all, but I want to know how large do the disks have to be in order to hold all the info? Basically, how large are the Windows 7 Recovery disks when trying to save an exact image of the computer (Making you computer EXACTLY the same as it was when the disk was made, down to the last byte). I'm currently using about 100GB of memory, so how large of a DVD do I need to be able to handle a recovery disk that has every back-up feature avalible, so I can downgrade if neccessary, and also just in case my computer suddenly dies one day. Help would be appreciated! Also, why isn't there anything else like this out there? Are these recovery disks really so small (Memory wise) that they can fit onto 5GB disks? If so, how, becuase for thing like backup images, wouldn't it have to copy every thing an compress the file (Which, while making it smaller, is limited to only compressing so much) Again, thanks in advance!

• Answer:

  The Backup could take up to _____GB of disk space. The answer can be found by following the directions linked here. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/