Windows 10 Recovery disk -- how often?

Phrixos said:

Thanks,all, for the input. (That last point about the 30 days is particularly enlightening.) At this point I'm surmising that the best course of action is (providing there has been no major update in the previous 30 days) to update it once ever four months or so.

Now another question. Just having created the disk. I got what many sites say to watch out for: the message the the disk could not be created. The uniform advice is, either to use a larger usb drive (mine is 8GB) or to uncheck the "backup" box. At that a strange thing happens. The drive that, with the backup, took nearly ten minutes to make and took up all of the 8GB with the backup, took only seconds to make and is less than 400MB. This would suggest that the backup takes 7.6GB, which is absurd.

Question: Is (a bit less than) 400MB size normal for a recorvery disk?

Phrixos said:

Will do. Thanks.

You know, I've been at computers for twenty years now. At this stage I've even built seven or eight--and Microsoft still keeps on pulling the rug out from underneath me (and, of course, so many others like me). Of course, I understand the frenetic march of technology, but far too much of the changes seem to be change purely for Change's sake. Gimmickry. Whatever happened to those sound words, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

So much for my little rant, but I'm not getting any younger (and Apple is, by degrees, looking that much more attractive).

Still new kid on the block compared with me .

This change was driven by advent of portable devices and need to reduce overall footprint of windows 10. Actually, provided you back up drivers, recovery drives are not really needed anymore, but are convenient.

"...control panel, recovery, create recovery drive, and select to copy system files."

After control panel, recovery, create recovery drive, the next window offers only "Create a recovery drive" (adding the option to "back up" system files. There is no option to "Copy System files"--but I'm guessing that you mean those are the same thing. Yes?

Since my 8GB Flash drive isn't big enough for that I guess I'll have to hunt up a bigger one.

If you want to have a backup which will bring your system back to its current state, you need to make a System Image. The system can be restored to a bare metal drive and be exactly the same as when the image was made. This option does need bootable media such as repair/recovery or install media.

System images can be created using the Windows utility or some third party utility.

A recovery drive for an OEM system will copy over the Factory Image on the hard drive and recover that system back to bare metal. As far as I know, that image never changes and will always set that system back to the condition it was after arriving from the seller. There have been problems trying to use a factory image from an earlier OS to recover on a Windows 10 install, if you are using the original hard drive.

Some OEMs have their own version of Recovery Media.

Got it. Thanks to all for the help.

Question marked as Solved.