Cloning System Partitions Only Without Destroying Data On Clone Drive

Stand by every body I think I could find a mean to "Clone" certain partitions in Macrium Reflect and not the whole drive by (Dragging and Dropping) specific partitions after creating a free space first on drive in question . I could have never thought about dragging and dropping a partition is an option until I saw it in some Youtube !

So right now I'm trying this clone option , hope it works , will report when its done .

Alright thanks Everybody I am now using the Cloned system Macrium Reflect has created , and its working fine . The virtues Macrium did are :

1 - Bios recognized it as a valid UEFI bootable drive

2 - Copy was done without rebooting windows into Bootload state surprisingly like Minitool Partition Wizard does

3 - The copy was surprisingly fast and non corrupted despite me using Windows while the Cloning was in progress

Macrium 3 : Minitool 0

Ghot said:

Yeah, that's why I wanted a screenshot of the whole drives...so I could see if there was room for a backup.
I always like making a backup and restoring that to the other drive, rather than cloning.

In my case I used a 2TB USB drive to store the image as my Laptop only had one slot for the drives.
I have three systems and I use this USB drive to store all my images. I keep multiple images of each system and delete the oldest after a new one is created. I works for me.

Jim

Phone Man said:

In my case I used a 2TB USB drive to store the image as my Laptop only had one slot for the drives.
I have three systems and I use this USB drive to store all my images. I keep multiple images of each system and delete the oldest after a new one is created. I works for me.

Jim

Out of curiosity , you save only the C: partition image or all the small ones scattered around too ? Because I got to realize through this journey that they cant be replaced by a fresh copy .

Ghot said:

Read post #11

Just open Macrium, click that option in RED, and SEE which partitions Macrium automatically check marks.
Those will be the partitions, you need to boot Windows successfully.

You don't need to actually run the backup... just SEE which partitions it check marks.

Yes it did select the bunch , and then what happens on attempting to restore , will it just ask for equivalent free space to the images or will it just demand erasing the drive entirely ?

Ghot said:

Both. It will reuse the space already used by your Windows installation.
In the process it will JUST erase the Windows installation and replace it with the backup.

Any other data on the same physical drive will be left alone.

This is what is so great about backup software. It's just like System Restore, except... it works!


System Restore just merges the condition of the Restore point with the current condition of the Windows install.
This is somewhat useful, but not really a good solution.

Backup software on the other hand, overwrites the current Windows installation with the backup.

So when we get infected, or do something stupid... restoring from a backup actually "fixes" these problems.



I was messing around on a website I shouldn't have been on, one time, and got... Ransomware. It locked up my computer completely.

BUT... I inserted the Macrium bootable media and hit the Restart button on the case.
It booted in the Macrium program and I restored from my backup.

Poof!!! Ransomware was gone.

I see , but not such a viable solution for me , those images gonna cost me a lot of time , bootable media , mind you space for me to store , I'll just stick to cloning the drive every now and then as it sounds like the same thing only more simple now I know the how to . thanks for the time and effort !

nIGHTmAYOR said:

Out of curiosity , you save only the C: partition image or all the small ones scattered around too ? Because I got to realize through this journey that they cant be replaced by a fresh copy .

My main drive is a 256MB SSD and I image it all. Takes about 15-20 min. I have two 2TB drives for data and those I use MS SyncToy to back up as it just updates the changed files.

This is my SSD and image all the partitions. I save multiple images for various Builds of Windows so I can go back to different versions is needed.



This is how I save the images


Jim