Windows 10: How to simulate a disaster in order to test a Macrium backup?

My, did that stir things up! Ok, so OP your not a techie, that's fine, but your statements and your alias say that you have a good number of years under your belt which is great. You read between the lines very well indeed!

Some facts, I had no idea that you were talking about a Vostro laptop as you did not say that in your OP. Your question was not platform specific but more of a general in nature question so I provided an in general answer.

So for a laptop the basics stated in my general answer stand true. Reason, Windows will not boot from a restored image applied to a disk outside of or external to a computer. So if you were to attach the disk you desire to recover the image to externally, perform the recovery to it then, put the disk into the laptop you have a greater than 99% chance that it won't boot. Reason, when you attach a disk externally to a computer in most cases that disk will be recognized as a removable disk and a limitation of Windows is that you cannot boot Windows from an external disk.

So where would the spare disk be located? In place of the existing disk as you said.

Does everyone purchase spare disks when they purchase a new laptop? No they do not. In most cases these same folks do not bother to backup their laptop either. Those whom choose to be proactive bear additional requirements and costs as it were to do so. Such is the nature of protecting ones precious data.

Someone posted about a WinPE disk and then made a statement about using that so that recovery could be done from within Windows. That is not correct. WinPE acts only as an environment from which to run the Macrium application to perform a recovery or a backup as either can be done with your machine booted into the WinPE environment. The question is can you successfully boot your PC into the WinPE environment? Without knowing that you can when the time comes to do so and you cannot then the image created by Macrium is worthless. So obviously successfully creating the WinPE recovery media and booting your machine to that media successfully are of the first and utmost importance in this whole backup/restore conversation. Additionally, while booted into WinPE you can perform backup and recovery operations to your computers disk while that disk is offline and therefore less prone to corruption.

So the choice is yours how you go about testing. You can certainly do as you originally suggested and destroy a perfectly good install on your computer and then restore your image to that computer. Before you do that however I would suggest that you create the WinPE recovery media if you have not done so already and make sure that you can boot your computer to that media before doing anything else. Once you know you can do that than the rest is just at your own risk and that risk assessment is up to your best judgement.

 

That is a totally false statement.. You most certainly can boot windows from an external drive or source...

 

If you are using an Enterprise edition yes you can. The problem is not so much Windows itself as it is the drive being seen as removable. I should have used the word removable rather than external, thanks for pointing that out. Most imaging solutions will cough up a warning to the user in such cases that the recovery can be completed but the device will not be bootable when the drive is seen as a removable type.

 

Just a couple more thoughts to all this......

1/ When I got my Dell it came loaded with lots of unwanted junk plus other stuff such as Microsoft 'click to run' Office. It also came with a Dell utility to make recovery disks to restore your PC to as new condition. There was another Dell utility included that allowed you to make disk images (like Macrium does).

Now I knew all along I would very quickly format and partition the drive just how I wanted and then clean install Windows thus getting rid of the masses of junk that slow everything down.

2/ Something to be aware of... I used Acronis imaging at the time while I was playing around and found that once you restored an image that it overwrites the MBR (master boot record) of the drive with proprietary code. That in itself is not an issue. What it does cause though is the loss of dedicated Dell functions. Although the image is restored OK, you lose the Dell backup and recovery and I think the 'click to run office' as these relied on the unique Dell MBR to enable them to be activated.

For me that was never a problem because I couldn't wait to ditch all the bloat anyway and rebuild it all to a super clean and speed Windows installation using things like LibreOffice to replace MS office and so on.

Something to be aware of though as I am not sure if Macrium rewrites the boot record in the same way Acronis did.

Maybe those with similar practical experience could comment.

 

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*Smile

BTW: Our spoken English is obfuscated and encrypted in order to fool any invaders.

We would greet you with open arms. That allows us to do a body search for knuckle dusters, flick-knives, suicide vests, wallets, and credit cards *Wink
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A good way to test he backup is to simply restore it in a virtual machine.

 

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I would like to remove as much junk as possible before creating an image. But with my luck, I'm guaranteed to delete something important. Is there a list of the junk somewhere?

Where is that?

And that? *Redface

Thanks.
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When you have the confidence (and the first time you attempt this its scary), you will find that clean installing Windows 10 (and that means totally wiping everything on the drive, well actually formatting the drive to make it 100% blank) will give you the best computing experience...

Have a look at these:

Erstellen eines Wiederherstellungsmediums für Windows 10 für Ihren Dell Computer | Dell Deutschland

http://www.dell.com/support/Article/...9/SLN147555/EN

My Vostro 3750 I'm sure came with a disk imaging utility but I can't just find an easy reference to that. Dell Datasafe maybe ?

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There is so much junk embedded onto new PC's that it is hard to remove completely. Although outwardly its 'easy' to uninstall stuff, there is still a 'trail of destruction' as I call it as not all parts are cleanly removed, the registry is left with 'dead' entries and so on.

Does that matter... well I like things neat and tidy and so a clean install is always the way to do that.

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Once you have a made a disk image and successfully restored it then your confidence will shoot up.