A couple of questions:
1) I have (3) machines with Windows 10 on them. Will a single recovery drive be usable on all three...if I ever needed it...or do I have to make (3) individual recovery drives? One machine is Windows 10 Home and the others are Pro...if that makes a difference.
2) If I have bootable Windows 10 USB, do I need a recovery drive, or does the Windows 10 install media serve the same purpose and include all the same tools?
Not sure what you mean by recovery drive, But
You can make a Bootable USB Stick that contains the Windows Recovery Environment - Thus be able to repair The Windows OS in case system is not bootable via HDD - which would be valid for either edition of Win10
If you make the USB Media with the "System Files" Option - then you would need one for EACH Edition
You can download the latest ISO at anytime free from media creation site no point in keeping a recovery as its likley it wont be upto date and may be wrong version so it wont work
When you refer to a recovery drive are you possibly thinking a portable HDD or SSD to restore a corrupt OS image for multiple PCs (using Macrium Reflect or similar app) ?
I have a 5TB portable HDD to maintain images for 4 or 5 PCs at my house. You could use a smaller drive but the price was right for the 5TB when I was shopping.
Seagate Backup Plus 5TB Portable Drive, Black | Staples.ca
I remake one regularly to keep it reasonably up to date:
Control Panel > Recovery > Create a recovery Drive > tick box for "Backup system files to the recovery drive."
Or:
Start > Windows Administrative Tools > Recovery Drive > tick box for "Backup system files to the recovery drive."
Makes sense to have one for each machine, I would think, I'm no expert.
In addition I have a bootable DVD and USB key drive for Windows 10 installs. OK, I have 3 eggs in one basket...
None of these are of course any sort full System Image backup.
As explained in Create a Bootable USB Recovery Drive - TenForumsTutorials, the Recovery Drive can contain the hardware drivers. So a separate one would be required for each computer.
But you could just make one and then use this to copy driver backups onto it for all your computers -
Backup and Restore Device Drivers - TenForumsTutorials
Denis
Thanks all...sorry I should've been clear. As someone alluded to above I was referring to the "create a recovery drive" option from within Windows...same as is discussed in the TenForums tutorial. It looks like I would need one for each version of Windows 10 (Home and Pro). I do periodically create a bootable Windows install disk...does that also include RE...and recovery tools...or is strictly for clean install?
1. If all the 3 machines are the same model, same configuration, same OS edition, - that is ditto same in all respects- then you can use the same Recovery Drive. Otherwise one for each.
2. Using the bootable recovery drive, you can restore the system as it came out of the factory including all the factory installed drivers and software. For example, my DELL system came with Office 2019 preinstalled. Using the recovery drive to factory restore, the office 2019 will also be installed. If you use bootable Windows 10 USB you will not have the factory installed drivers/applications.
Now elaborating what Helmut said in post #5, screenshots below.
A flash drive is not the best medium for longtime data storage. The charge in the memory slowly dissipates over the years and after some years you may not be able to boot from the flash drive due to this data loss. So create a new recovery drive on the same 32 GB flash drive every year - refresh.
Alternatively, after creating the 32GB Recovery drive, create an image of the Flash drive, using PassMark's Image USB
Tools for OSForensics - ImageUSB - Write an image to multiple USB Flash Drives and save the image to an external HDD. In case your Recovery drive does not boot due to data loss, you can restore the image on to that flash drive and then boot from it.
Last edited by jumanji; 09 Apr 2020 at 15:18.
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