on the march...
In the meantime, can you tell me why saving it to my external backup drive {E} wouldn't work? I want to be able to have an image there, and on a flash drive, if possible.
I was spooked by your E drive being shown as "unformatted primary", so told you to choose F as a first attempt just to get your feet wet and savvy how to do it.
BUT.....................you should try to make a second image after this one finishes.
Do EVERYTHING the same EXCEPT choose E as destination and see what happens.
It may be fine and work OK. I just don't quite know the status of your E drive.
When the current image finishes, go to F:\Backup and find the file. It will have an mrimg extension.
Tell me how large it is in gigabytes.
If your attempt at an image to the E drive works, then just delete this one.
I'll be online for you for the next 3 or 4 hours.
ummm, don't know how to convert it to gigabytes, but it is 133,951,782 KB
going to attempt {C} to {E} again
That's about 133 gigabytes.
When you choose a destination, you have to have enough empty space.
You are currently set to keep 3 images automatically. When you make a 4th, the oldest one will be deleted automatically.
You can change that setting to keep only 2 if you want. I keep only 2 myself.
You oughta make a new image from time to time. Maybe weekly. Maybe monthly.
I have the next one running...and discovered the cause of my ONLY {F} disc to be imaged. Instead of starting on the far left and selecting Create an Image....I was starting in the middle of the screen on the Image this Disc button. duh. I was able to re-create the problem and won't do THAT again.
My E: drive device is a 5T (yep, go big or go home...ha!) Seagate backup drive. I plugged it in, and it worked, and I have copied all my Documents, Pictures, Music, etc., to it and re-accessed them without any problems....so hopefully this will go good as well. We'll see.
What is the purpose of your F drive? What's it for?
A few things for you to ponder:
How do I restore this image?
How do I even start my PC to restore an image if my C drive drops dead at midnight?
Is this image file important enough that you might want 2 copies of it?
Forget flash drives as a destination: slower than slow; flimsy; low capacity, easily lost, etc.
Well...when I ended up with separate drives, it was suggested that I use one for system files and one for data files. {F} ended up being for the data files. If my machine went belly-up again, I would like to have all my data duplicated on an external drive. (When I went through this last fiasco the rent-a-tech said that he was having problems restoring my data from my old hard drive to my new one. That resulted in nested, looping, and otherwise horrible things. One of you angels helped get me out of that mess. It would have been nice to have it all in another place.
I'm assuming that Macrium has good restore options...just haven't made it that far yet. I'm also making bootable Win10 cd and a bootable USB flash drive to install Windows again. Also, I've been advised to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive - but I have no idea what that is. And a Kyhi boot rescue flash drive. I hope that would give me enough options to get Windows back and I'd have all my data elsewhere. These are all suggestions from the forum. Do you concur? I'm over my head but I'm trying.
OH, hurrah! My {C} to {E} image completed successfully. The file is 133,953,338 KB.
Thank you for all your assistance. I never could have made it this far without you. I really appreciate your patience and step-by-step instructions.
In answer to your question -
Good idea. It appears you don't consider this Macrium image file to be "data" worthy of being backed up like pictures of your cat or your tax returns or your barbecue recipes. Why is that?
It totally is, that's what started the whole "get an image of {C} onto my external backup drive as soon as possible" in the first place was all about. I should have said it's for data and backups.
If everything died at noon tomorrow, I may just jump off of a tall building. At least you gave me until noon! Thanks for that, but can we make it 3:00 instead?
I'll have to keep working on this stuff in the morning. Been a long day, and I'm an old lady and need my beauty sleep.
You have been just amazing and I can never thank you enough.
Here's my advice based on your last post:
Your F drive appears to have over 500 GB free space as of 2 or 3 days ago.
It should have over 350 free now because you just added a 133 GB image file to it.
You say your image files are as important as a cat picture.
Therefore:
I would save images to F like any other data file and back them up to the external E just like any other important file.
The ONLY reason I wouldn't do that is if I did not have enough space on E. But you appear to have enough space to hold at least 2, maybe 3 images.
Unless you have an unusual circumstance, I'd think you'd be fine with keeping 2 images, making a new one every month.
Set Macrium to keep just 2 images.
You make an image in October and another in November. When you make the December image, the October one will be deleted automatically. You'd always have the 2 most recent.
Maybe you see flaws in that idea. If so, let me know tomorrow.
If possible, post a screen shot of Windows Disk Management showing full details of your recently purchased 5 TB backup drive.
Last edited by ignatzatsonic; 16 Oct 2020 at 00:59.
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