I got me a Dell laptop and want to backup the OS and everything else to a flash drive in case of a future total failure. People have told me to use an external hard drive for the purpose because it has more room and can do repeated backups, but that's not a concern for me. I just want to do a one-time backup at the beginning. I attempted doing it last night, but my flash drive (64GB) doesn't even show up as an option to save the backup image to. It also turns out that I need to make a system recovery drive which needs 16GB. Would it be possible to just create the recovery drive on the 64GB flash drive, then after that back up the computer to its own hard drive, then copy the backup over to the remaining space in the flash drive? The current used space in the computer is about 40GB, so it would fit in the flash drive along with the system recovery, but would everything function the way it should?
I've heard that creating a recovery drive to a USB flash drive erases everything on the flash drive. So I was thinking I could create the recovery drive first, and then add the system image backup afterwards. What do you think of that?
Also, I already downloaded the Win10 .iso file from Microsoft and burned it to a DVD when I had a previous computer. I still have that DVD. Is that all I'd need if I ever had a hard drive failure?
For the record, third party tools offer much more options than Windows.
Best free PC backup software | TechRadar
I went to that site and clicked on the first offering, which was AOMEI Backupper Standard. All I got was an error message saying, "This site cannot be reached".For the record, third party tools offer much more options than Windows.
Best free PC backup software | TechRadar
But even if I use the Windows backup program, would the method I was talking about before be something that would work (creating the system recovery drive on the 64GB flash drive, followed by the system backup image on the same flash drive)?
The problem you are going to face likely is that the boot partition is most likely going to have to be FAT32 and you can't save an image file over 2GB on FAT32.
I would make a small bootable FAT32 USB flash drive of Kyhi's recovery drive found here in the software subforum. Run Macrium Reflect from that to save an image to a second 64 GB USB flash drive formatted as NTFS - if 64 GB is big enough.
Would it be possible to just use the system repair disk I made for Windows 7? Or would that be incompatible with Windows 10? What I'm thinking of doing is just using the Windows 7 system repair disk with a clean install of Windows 10 since I already have the windows 10 ISO saved to a DVD disc, but I don't know if the Windows 7 system repair disc would be compatible with Windows 10.The problem you are going to face likely is that the boot partition is most likely going to have to be FAT32 and you can't save an image file over 2GB on FAT32.
I would make a small bootable FAT32 USB flash drive of Kyhi's recovery drive found here in the software subforum. Run Macrium Reflect from that to save an image to a second 64 GB USB flash drive formatted as NTFS - if 64 GB is big enough.
I noticed in the back up section there was a heading called looking for an older backup and it would still work on Windows 10 but I'm not sure how that's possible if I used Window 7 to create it.
Does this mean that if I created a system image backup using a Windows 7 computer I would be able to use that system image backup to restore Windows 10 operating system? If this is the case I would like to know so i would know whether or not to count on the current backup I have to be sufficient. I've been trying for the past week to create a backup of my current system without any success and it would be nice if I knew whether or not what I have is good enough.
I don't really know anything about mixing the Windows 7 and 10 built-in imaging backups/restore. I do know that there have been many more posts about people having problems with the Windows built-in backup image and restore than there have been about Macrium Reflect.
