Windows 10: Is there a point in creating an image of your SSD and HD separately?

No. You'd just open Macrium, navigate to the image file on the external, and tell Macrium to restore that file to the destination of your choice.

Do yourself a favor: pretend your SSD fails one minute from now and do what you have to do to convince yourself that you know what to do by walking partway through the procedure. You need to understand the menu choices and need to confirm your "boot disk" will boot.

 

I thought if PC fails, e.g it wont boot up, you load the Rescue CD, insert the external HD with the images, select correct image and restore.
Or is the "open Macrium, navigate to the image file on the external, and tell Macrium to restore that file to the destination of your choice" a procedure for if your PC still loads normally, but something isnt right and you want to restore an old image?

Yes I confirmed that my bootable CD works when I just installed the SSD 3 weeks ago. That is the only thing I have 'tested'.
But I will definitely look into the Macrium manual more.

 

I used to think that but I haven't seen any Windows update for weeks (attachment). Thanks for the tip-off about next Tuesday. I will make a manual Macrium image of my SSD (C drive) before bedtime on Monday.

Attachment 152473

BTW, I backup my internal HD (Documents, Pictures etc.) regularly using FreeFileSync. It backsup only the changes that have occurred since the last BU, so is very quick despite holding 650 GB in total.

"just a storage"! Mine holds decades of images, and is backed up a second time on another drive.

 

If your PC can still boot from the hard drive, boot and open Macrium from that hard drive, and then restore.

If your PC will NOT boot from the hard drive, boot from the rescue media. You will be presented with the same Macrium interface. Restore from that interface.

The choices made in Macrium are the same in either case. It's up to you to know what those choices are and to choose correctly. I'd think it's better to know that now rather than later when you are in a jam.

 

Just my preference: I make a full of my Data partition now and then. Just recently, I added the learning of how to make restorable incremental backups via Macrium Reflect 7 and Image for Windows 3.

 

According to me, backing up data is more important than backing up OS installation. OS (specially W10) and programs you can replace easy enough but precious data may be lost FOREVER !!!

 

That depends on your OS changes and installed programs.

I have re-located the user folders, set up links of swapfiles and internet caches to other locations. There are countless small tweaks and customizations and many, many scripts. 630 installed programs and 900+ VSTs (audio devices), most seldom used.

When I upgraded from XP to Win 7 it took me a month. I have since only done in-place upgrades of the OS - never re-installed.

I don't have any SSDs, so I have distributed things across several fast drives to help overcome rotational latencies. In the future, I might not do that if I just had a big SSD for everything and my personal stuff was in one spot.

But that would be one (or two) very large drive(s).

 

SSD's fail just like Spinners so I do an Image Daily on my C: drive , it takes about 5 minutes and since I do not use restore points I find it a necessity. I also image my D: drive which contains all of my Steam games but not that often.

 

One thing I'm looking forward to in the next version of Windows for HEDT is the support for large amounts of NVRAM memory.

I hope my next computer will have enough memory surplus that I can create a RAMDisk and load Windows and important things there from a storage device.

So everything will be available at PCI memory speeds.

Backups would then be equivalent to memory dumps.

 

"...create a RAMDisk and load Windows ..." I hoping you can tell us how you did it, when that time comes *Smile

 

As far as I can tell, you use GRUB to create a ramdisk, and use it to boot a virtual hardrive. Not a simple exercise but obviously has been done looking on web. However, to do this on NVRAM would cost an insane amount of cash. People skirmished with NVRAM a few years back, but SSDs have advanced enough to give most of the benefit anyway.

 

It doesn't have to be NVRAM, I'd be willing to re-load memory on each restart. I just want the support to run from memory that that edition may supply.

It would be expensive, but some people buy yachts, gamble, etc. You gotta have a hobby.
The main issue is motherboard support for something near a Terabyte of memory on 8 or 16 channels - that might be years away.

No matter the SSD speed there is still a copy from disk to memory. I don't know, but I'm hoping that support will avoid the copy.

 

"..."...create a RAMDisk and load Windows ..." I meant: after you do that successfully, tell me how that was done, I'm interested in learning!

 

Like my 120 Mhz Gateway Windows XP computer, all SCSI, with SCSI DAT backup and HP Scanjet scanner. Costs just $10K.

Or my old music hardware that cost $30K.

I just laugh at the current prices, they really are insane.

 

My first Dell 486DX (with a 240MB HD @ $1/MG) I think was $2500+-; my first Pentium III MMX was $2K+- if memory serves me. Software ranged from DOS 3.33 to DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1 thru WFW 3.11; was forced to jump to Windows 95, later onto to 98/98SE; I had to make the jump to Windows 7 -- where I am today; I refuse to go to Windows 10.