Macrium Reflect image question - dedicated drive?

Steve C said:

Some further tips not mentioned above

1. Some people use Reflect to clone their system to a spare drive in order to have a backup drive immediately available to boot
2. The Reflect feature viBoot van be used to boot from a Reflect image to confirm you have a viable backup

Reflect is an excellent and very well supported product. I wouldn't now use anything else having tried various alternatives (certainly not anything from Acronis)

I believe if you read from the beginning, and other threads the OP has started on Macrium similar subjects, you'll find he has been using it for cloning, and is now investigating imaging as an alternative.

dictum said:

How big of a USB flash drive do I need to make this Macrium Reflect recovery image?

I have two, one is 16GB and the other is 32GB. I noticed they rapidly went down in price. So I can get another one if I have to.

One holds Win10 Preloaded environment I got off this disk (the 16GB model) and the 32 holds Windows 10 install image I downloaded. My guess is, I won't use the latter again so 32GB is fit for this project.

The Macrium Rescue environment will easily fit on a 4GB thumb. Here's a snapshot of mine. <500MB. I'm using the RE environment, and I think the PE environment is a little larger....maybe 650-700MB. It will fit on the smallest available thumb you can get. Just use a decent brand.

dictum said:

The other thing that I wonder about, Macrium Reflect image process recovers the operating system but of course not your personal files in ~/Documents that can be significantly larger than 17GB. So the point of the image is to boot an operating system and recover it. And deal with the data later.

I hardly ever suffer data loss. Usually the damage is on the operating system level, or the EFI partition and such.

If your personal files (Documents/Pictures/Videos/Etc.) are on the C: drive/partition, they will be backed up automatically as part of backing up the C: drive. Nothing special you need to do. If those files, or others you may have, are on another partition, say D: for example, just include that partition along with C: and the other support partitions in your definition file, and they will be backed up when you run it. If the data files are in fact on a separate partition, they could be restored by themselves without restoring the whole OS. Same with restoring just the OS and not the data files. Lots of flexibility. And, of course, as mentioned a few times, the image file could be mounted and "Explored" like a drive to view and/or copy anything you wanted.

Lots of options.

Bree said:

Actually the PE environment is even smaller, <300MB

Thanks, Bree, smaller then.........

Still fits nicely on the smallest thumb the OP can find. RE is preferred, if available. If he has deleted his Recovery Partition, as some suggest doing to save ~750MB on a 1TB drive, he will be forced to use the PE.

But is way OT. So, back to the basics.

dictum said:

I am currently doing this, "Make a disk image" option. Writing to my external USB drive. It's large and slow.

Where is the link on how to make a bootable recovery flash drive? I have a 8GB USB flash drive I can allocate to that usage.

It's currently writing the disk image to the large 4TB drive I have but that's not the same thing. Plus I already have a Windows PE USB flash drive I created based on this forum, is that what you mean or something else?

The Windows PE rescue thumb you have previously created is the product of Kyhi. It is not the same thing...a totally different content and purpose. The Rescue thumb you need for Macrium is tailored to your machine and the purposes intended for restoring in a Rescue Environment, among other things (not important now). The entire process for creating the Rescue Environment and the Rescue Media (thumb drive in this case) is outlined in detail and completely in Macrium's Knowledge Base linked here:

Creating rescue media - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

The tutorial in Tenforums that has been posted for you a few times does not seem to be updated to the current version of Macrium, so you will find all current info in the Knowledge Base link above.

Thanks, Jimbo, but this whole current discussion pertains to the Macrium Reflect product Rescue Media. Nothing at all to do with Linux or any general purpose Rescue Environments, Like Kyhi's or Linux, or any other. Macrium specific for it's purpose.