Question about imaging

Scottyboy99 · 28 Jan 2018

Admittedly I am very lax on doing an image. I did a macrium one prob over a year ago and it took a long time to do my c: (SSD 400 gigs) and f: drive (mechanical HD 2 TB). Lack of spare time stops me doing it. My question is would you guys bother imaging your secondary drive. I mean if things are going to go wrong it’s going to likely be your windows drive right? My secondary f: drive is dedicated to games mainly steam ones with pretty static data but it’s about 2 tb full of a total 3 tb capacity. Say I had to re image my c drive it wound all just knit back together with f: right ? I mean say I’ll launch steam it’ll know all the games are there etc

Josey Wales · 28 Jan 2018

I image my main SSD with MR and all of my Steam Games are on a second SSD. I clone that drive every so often and I also save my games to a spinner. Steam does have them in The Cloud but I have around 16 games and it would take a great deal of time to sync 340 Gb's.

Scottyboy99 · 28 Jan 2018

Ok thank you. I will probably do the same then.

dalchina · 29 Jan 2018

The base image (first) takes longer to create. If you then use differential imaging (the difference between 'now' and the base image) that image is faster and smaller.

E.g. (depending on how big your C: content is) 9-12 mins SSD over USB3 to a 5400rpm disk.
Note: starting a differential image in Macrium is relatively unobvious, sadly.

Yes, I would image every disk. Every disk can fail.

lx07 · 29 Jan 2018

Scottyboy99 said:

I mean if things are going to go wrong it’s going to likely be your windows drive right?

Wrong.

dalchina said:

I would image every disk. Every disk can fail.

Exactly.

If you have some way of recovering the data on your secondary drive (several days downloading stuff from Steam, OneDrive, Netflix whatever) then fine - don't back it up. I don't either - I take the risk as in 20 years I've never had a disk failure. Perhaps I will and it would be boring downloading stuff but not a question of loss.

Consider if you have personal stuff (photos, documents) that you can't get back though. Your disk (either or both of them) may fail tomorrow. If you don't back it up you are treating it as a temporary scratch disk. That is fine - it is what I do - but back up your irreplaceable stuff and leave a copy at a friends house, in the cloud or somewhere though for gods sake.

Scottyboy99 · 29 Jan 2018

Thanks guys. Yeah all my photos, music etc are backed up in triplicate on NAS drives dotted around the house, also have Apple's icloud holding my music as a fourth tier of backup.

Basically this secondary drive is choc full of games, origin, steam etc. So it can all be redownloaded. It's more a question of if my C: windows install borks for some reason can I just image that and then use that image. My secondary F drive which sat there untouced then knits back together with it ok. I know C: has all sorts of references to program installs that reside on the secondary drive. I'd hate to then suddenly see all my steam desktop shortcuts, start menu links go awry after restoring C:

For the most convenience I know imaging the whole lot is best and then incremental after that. But I also know doing almost 2.5 TB data on an image will take a long long time. So I felt maybe just doing C which is much less and also SSD would be easier and quicker.

cereberus · 29 Jan 2018

Scottyboy99 said:

Thanks guys. Yeah all my photos, music etc are backed up in triplicate on NAS drives dotted around the house, also have Apple's icloud holding my music as a fourth tier of backup.

Basically this secondary drive is choc full of games, origin, steam etc. So it can all be redownloaded. It's more a question of if my C: windows install borks for some reason can I just image that and then use that image. My secondary F drive which sat there untouced then knits back together with it ok. I know C: has all sorts of references to program installs that reside on the secondary drive. I'd hate to then suddenly see all my steam desktop shortcuts, start menu links go awry after restoring C:

For the most convenience I know imaging the whole lot is best and then incremental after that. But I also know doing almost 2.5 TB data on an image will take a long long time. So I felt maybe just doing C which is much less and also SSD would be easier and quicker.

In simple terms, imaging the C drive and associated hidden files is all you need to do to primarily restore status of PC if you get issues.

Of course, backing up other drives and/or visible partitions (ie those with a drive letter) is important but you can use a number of tools ranging from simple manual copying with File Explorer or semi/fully automatic with File History Backup or one of many 3rd party tools.

Personally, I only image the C drive plus hidden partitions as it keeps the backup image lean and mean. Any critical data gets backed up to cloud, and my HDD is backed up now and then, pragmatically accepting I may have to redownload some stuff (it is mostly videos from Amazon etc). Nothing is critical really. I do not install non portable programs on drives other than C as that complicates upgrades.

As an aside, I have turned off the old system restore points, and simply create incremental backups using Macrium Reflect Home (paid version) as that has the awesome Rapid Delta Restore which means I can do same in effect as restoring a system restore point but much quicker, and more reliably.

lx07 · 30 Jan 2018

lx07 said:

I take the risk as in 20 years I've never had a disk failure. Perhaps I will

Well that will teach me to tempt fate.

This morning for the first time ever there is no operating system found on my laptop SSD.

Oh well

dalchina · 30 Jan 2018

Looks like you're in for a fun morning! My commiserations.. I recall when marking exams in a Chinese university how I suddenly lost all the partition table for my disk.. time was against me. I had no other PC.. eventually fixed it.

That was before I started disk imaging ...

lx07 · 30 Jan 2018

I fixed it thanks to Kyhi rescue disk.

I was trying to help on this thread 2 Partition system? - Windows 10 Forums and set my system partition inactive just to get a screenshot. Sometimes I really am an idiot.

I am now going to bow to peer pressure and make my first Macrium backup since September before something else goes wrong. You are all correct and I'm not but, phewww anyway!