Windows 10: recovery vs image

It's more complicated than that in Windows 10, which will put more on the Recovery Drive.

If you tick the box to include System files, it creates a usb drive which will reinstall Windows 10 on a blanked drive.

So there's more of an overlap with the System Image now.

 

Just to note that I wouldn't use that for the windows Recovery Drive though, because that wipes the disk clean - get a USB thumb drive for that.

 

I agree with you, Windows backup sucks. *Smile But I still do mine a little different than you guys. I use an Acronis Boot disk (dvd) then make a complete copy of my partitions and all my programs, unto a 2nd hard drive installed on my computer. Whole job takes me 6 to 8 mins top. But I just have a home computer, no work files on it. My Windows 10 and all my programs only take up 50 gig of space.

 

i just checked and my C drive has 74.2 GB of used space

 

Then with Macrium Reflect high compression you might get away with a 64gb flash drive, but 128gb would be for certain.

Also, before doing an image backup, you can run disk cleanup (Windows 10 included program) to remove temp files, and I also use CCleaner to catch a few more files.

If you never plan on going back to a previous operating system, when you run disk cleanup for the first time there is an option to delete system files or system update files or something like that. Click that box and disk cleanup will restart and delete the temporary update system files.

SanDisk Cruzer Glide USB Flash Drive 128GB by Office Depot OfficeMax

It's USB 2.0 so it would be a little longer for a backup.

 

Plenty of thumb drives are big enough for a OS image these days. You can get a 128 GB one for about $30, which is bigger than my entire C:\ partition which Windows 10 is installed on. I'm currently using 21.5 GB of the 100 GB partition. Granted, I've only had Windows 10 installed for a few days (and it was a clean install), so I don't have all of the programs I use installed yet, but I have a lot of them installed, including the biggest one I use (Adobe Illustrator CS4), and the rest of them that I use aren't very big. By the time I get everything installed, it will probably still be under 25 GB. I always save all of my files (documents, music, videos, etc.) to a different partition, so installed programs are the only things which take up additional space on my C:\ drive. This saves a lot of time and hassle when reinstalling Windows.

 

you fellas are a ton of help , thanks