Use Macrium Reflect to backup a partition or the drive

My laptop, which is essentially a portable version of my desktop, has one physical drive partitioned into System and Data partitions. The Data partition is sync'd with my laptop so, if it were to be lost, it could be readily, though slowly, recovered.

I use Reflect to create backups and my son and I - he lives 30 minutes drive away - swap backup drives every few weeks. At the moment I create an image containing both the System and Data partitions. Clearly, as the data volume is fairly large, it takes some time to create the image which is also fairly large.

It seems to be more sensible to only image the System partition. However, in the event of some disaster, could the image be restored to either a replacement drive, or even a new PC?

Although it may take longer to image the entire drive, when you restore (if you must) its only one operation, rather than having to restore the system portion, then partition the drive then copy the data from another PC, which will take longer than just doing a full drive image restore.

There are multiple strategies for protecting files and recovery from crashes, corruption, malware, ransomware, etc.
One option would be to create two different backup images.

One of my drives just crashed and the Macrium backup image could not be used.

The first image could be made immediately after a clean install of Windows, drivers and applications.
This way you can plan to be back running the computer quickly.
The second image could be an image of Windows, drivers, applications, and files with incremental updates.

The weakness of the incremental Macrium backup image is if the operating system or registry becomes corrupt and cannot be repaired by scannow, restorehealth or an in place upgrade repair. The image will have the corruption. The same for problematic drivers that may cause BSOD, or malware as they are part of the incremental image.

An additional option is to copy and paste the USERS folder to an external HD every quarter or every month or as frequently as needed. This may take many hours and it seems to be one of the most secure methods for backing up files.

You could clone the data partition to the backup hard drive instead of imaging it. After it is cloned the first time, then use a program such as FreeFileSync to just update the backup hard drive replacing only the data files that have changed.

Thanks for these. Some food for thought.

dalchina said:

Note Windows installations create more than 1 partition. Full restoration - e.g. to a new drive should the old one fail- requires all those partitions.

Apologies, loose language. I meant the Windows partitions including the hidden ones; as you say, and as I use, Macrium has the the option "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows".