Windows 10: Windows 10 System Image

I would like to create a complete system image using the built-in Windows 10 image backup. I understand how to do this onto an external hard drive. I also understand that I can create a bootable flash drive there as well. But do I have to create this flash drive or could I download that later from another computer should I need it? And if I do create it on USB how much capacity does it require on the USB? Since I have never done this so any tips would sure be appreciated.

:)

 

Windows 10 System Image overwrites previous image

I found the really simple answer elsewhere. case closed.

 

Windows 10 System Image overwrites previous image

Hi Kashka,

Thank you for posting the query on Microsoft Community. I am glad to assist you on this.

Please refer to the link below and see if it helps:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows-8/create-usb-recovery-drive
(also applies to windows 10)


Also refer the link below for more information on the recovery options:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows-10/windows-10-recovery-options

Hope this information helps. If you have any other queries related to windows we will be glad to help you.

Thank you.

 

Hi, we recommend using 3rd party tools for preference e.g. Macrium Reflect (free) as these are
- more complete
- more feature rich
- maintained, supported and documented
- more robust and reliable

 

You can create it from another computer. If you do only the generic, Windows 10 installation drive from an ISO from Microsoft, you will need 4 GB, but it will use absolutely all of it. You are supposed to be able to restore Windows images from standard installation drives. I recommend 8 GB at a minimum. If you create an actual system recovery drive, the space required varies widely between 8GB minimum to 32 GB.

There is no way I would trust built-in Windows imaging. The number of problems reported with Windows built-in imaging are many, many times greater than the number of problems reported with Macrium Reflect (including the Free version of Macrium Reflect).

 

Thanks for the info. I did a little reading after your posts, but in a nutshell, what is the general problem with using the Windows 10 system imaging? Does it not recover to a new hard drive properly or what? Thanks.

 

If you research the threads posted asking for help on that, you will find them unresolved as far as I've seen. For example, problems accessing external disks, or previous backups.

 

Various issues, the biggest issue has been trying to restore the image when required. To the best of my knowledge, the backup image is matched to the computer and can only be restored to that computer. There have been lots of complaints of people who have been trying to restore an image and Windows says there is no image for it. (Which is exactly what @dalchina posted about above mine!)

Also people have had problems when making the image with Windows including drives they don't want in the image and not being able to save the image to the drive they want to. Let's say you have an SSD and a HDD. Most of the time the OS you want to image is going to be on the SSD and you probably want to save the image on the HDD. Well if Windows in infinite wisdom wants to put part of the pagefile on the HDD, then Windows imaging is going to want to backup the HDD as well as the SDD - which also eliminates the HDD as a possibility to save the image to because it is now one of the drives being backed up.

Just curious, what is your hesitation to using Macrium Reflect Free? It does not have any of the problems or limitations above.

 

No hesitation really, I just discovered it reading these posts as of yesterday. I will probably try it since I don't want any headaches should I ever need to recover the image. By the way, my PC has a 2TB hard drive with maybe only 50Gb used. I read somewhere that the hard drive that you are cloning to had to be as big as the drive you are cloning. Does that mean I cannot make the image to a 1TB external drive?

 

By default, Macrium Reflect will create a compressed image of only the used space on the partitions you tell it to make an image of. Very conservatively you can calculate the space needed for the backup image to be about 90% of the used space of what you are backing up. In your case that would be 90% of the 50GB used. Also add in the System Reserved partition which might be 500MB. If you have less than 64GB of space used across all the partitions you wanted to backup, Macrium Reflect could save that image onto a 64GB USB flash drive if you wanted.

To make my images as small as possible, I do a good disk cleanup before making the image:
Disk Cleanup - Open and Use in Windows 10

 

Only used data is normally included in an image. It is possible to create a forensic image, where everything is preserved, literally bit by bit. Such images are of course much bigger.

Images are compressed. Different compression algorithms are supported, which can make images a little smaller at the expense of more processing time.

Bear in mind that disk imaging normally means you will have a set of images - the base image being the largest, subsequent differential or incremental images being smaller and faster to create.

You can restore using any of those as a starting point, thus a base image and 5 diff'l or inc'l images gives you 6 possible restore dates.

Macrium allows you to control how many are kept. Thus you need to plan your image storage based on your image set, and the used data you are imaging. The different compression ratios make a marginal difference.

As a rough guide, the base image will be about 50% of the used data you are imaging.

 

Depends on the options you choose. I haven't used Macrium (yet), I have struggled with all the problems inherent in the Windows backup, and can confirm that while it can restore an image reliably, it is really temperamental about being able to see/find the image to be restored. There are lots of 'no-no's with it, particularly renaming/copying/moving images that are on external drives. In short, even I wouldn't advise using it.

A byte-for-byte clone of a drive will require a drive larger than the drive being imaged to store it. However an image of the system won't include the unused space of the partition being backed up, it should be no larger than the used space on the original drive.

 

The thought of cloning to a flash drive had occurred to me but I was thinking an external hard drive might be more dependable for recovery. Is that thinking wrong??? Also, if using Reflect, do I need a separate bootable flash drive or can all that go on the external drive (or stick)?

By the way, this clone will just be made and saved in case of a hard drive failure down the road. My last computer was over 13 years old and ran 24 hours a day all those years. Amazingly, the hard drive still ran perfect. And I had never made a system backup, just my own files and photos, etc.

 

You are exactly correct, an external HDD is much more reliable for long term storage of a backup image than a USB flash drive is. Macrium Reflect Free includes the capability to create a rescue drive. It will either create a bootable USB flash drive for you, or it will create an ISO file. You can use the ISO file to make a bootable partition on a USB hard drive. When I deployed last time that's what I did. A USB hard drive with a bootable FAT32 partition on it with my recovery tools, including Macrium Reflect Free. The rest of the hard drive was an NTFS partition with all my movies and a backup image stored on it.

I've set up computers with clean installs of Windows for friends and created NTFS partitions at the end of the drives and saved an image of the clean Windows install in that partition, then remove the drive letter from it to hide it from Windows explorer. That way if their Windows installation got corrupted somehow, but the drive was still good, the hope would be the image stored on the hidden partition could be restored easily by booting from a rescue drive to access it. That's only protection from software corruption, obviously, and won't be any good for a hardware failure.

 

So to be safe I should probably go ahead and create the rescue flash drive since this would probably only be used if my hard drive dies? If so, how big of a flash drive would that take (not the clone, just the rescue)? And are some flash drives better than others brand wise or are they pretty much all okay?