I'm active in SeniorNet. We have helped about 20 persons to upgrade to Windows 10.
One peculiar thing we noticed is that different PC´s demand different size for the USB Recvery disk after the uppgrade.
We had a range from 4GB to 32GB.
A majority used 16GB.
What is the reason for this difference?
Björn
because these PCs have different user data?
That's a tough one man, I googled that one and this is about all I could find out about the recovery drive.
Creating a USB recovery drive - Windows Help
If you read on down the page it talks about different recovery drive options. I'm thinking the space for each machine is different based on the size of the recovery partition Windows creates for itself during setup. Plus your doing upgrades from old installs so each PC will have different information on each one. During the upgrade process from Windows 7 for example the users entire Windows 7 install is backed up for the first 30 days in case the end user wishes to revert back to Windows 7. If that is the case for your machines then it would explain why your seeing different sized recover partitions. The system is adjusting the sized based on the original size of the Windows 7 install and associated user folder files, would be my answer.
If anyone knows more about this please chime in.
I believe the recovery drive only contains files to recover windows 10 and no applications or user data, or?
Recovery drive also contains manufacturer specific drivers. The more manufacturer specific drivers a computer has, the bigger the recovery drive will be. Also, just because a certain size USB flash drive is demanded does not mean that is the size of the data written to it. The smallest stand alone Windows install media will barely fit in 4 gb. You pretty much add one driver to that and you now need the next size larger flash drive which is 8 gb - but maybe only 5 gb of it will actually be used.
It also depends on what program is used to create the recovery drive. If it is pure Windows, then only manufacturer drivers and Windows itself will be written to the recovery drive. If a manufacturer's program is used, then likely everything required to restore the entire hard drive back to factory state will be written to the recovery drive - including all the crapware that comes with the computer from the factory.
It was all created with the tools in Windows 10.
On the 4GB case I have to check again,
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