I know there's a love affair here with Macrium Relfect but for levity and fairness, any quality backup program will do the job, not just Macrium. Acronis for one, Paragon's Hard Disk Manager for another.
The point is to be aware Macrium isn't the only program out there to do the basic thing you want to do. And for the record I've got nothing against Macrium, I use it for certain situations (creating disk images) but for backups I actually use Acronis.
You can also create a bootable partition on your external hard drive and put the Macrium Restore Drive there. One plug solution, then.
The "love affair" with Macrium is a strong consequence of User Experience here. It is very reliable, support is excellent (ok only paid users get direct support but Free version gets benefit and is updated often within a couple of days of an issue being reported).
Couple this with fact it is the only tool I tested apart from Easeus Todo that backed up 32bit UEFI installs (I tested all main players), and ability to mount images in Hyper-V, no other tool comes close.
And if like me, you do buy it, Rapid Delta Restore is amazing.
So why recommend a Buick or Vauxhall, when you can recommend a Rolls Royce?
Up until now, I've just been backing up all personal files to a flash drive that I keep secure. But now that I have a working external hard drive (which I just looked through to get any old stuff I want), I wanted to do a full backup of everything, including the OS and programs like I've always been told I should but couldn't since I didn't have an operating external hard drive before.
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Yep, I saw that but understood what you meant.
The Macrium installation would be on your regular primary INTERNAL hard drive.
There's no reason to use the bootable flash drive at all................................................................................................. ....unless your hard drive is dead and will not boot.
That's a common occurrence.
What are you going to do in that situation? How do you boot your PC to restore an image?????
Since I don't have internet for my laptop at home, I'm downloading the Free version to a flash drive now and will transfer it to my laptop when I get home. I figure the trial version would require me to go online to start the trial period. But even if not, it's the safe software otherwise.
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I guess I was assuming that if the internal hard drive died, then I'd be able to boot it using the Macrium Installation on the external hard drive to boot the computer and then use the backup image. Of course, that would be after I replaced the dead internal hard drive with a new one, which would be empty. Once that's done, I would use the image on the external drive to put my backed up image info. onto the new internal drive. Doesn't it work that way?
I would install it on my internal main drive at first in order to create a backup image of the drive onto my external drive, but I thought that MR would be installing some sort of boot mechanism onto the external drive along with the backup image in order to be able to restore that image if necessary.
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