Please Don't Laugh at This Question

I have a new computer coming and I want to make a full backup of my files on a USB in case they get accidentally deleted or by some other unforeseen issue. It did google it, but some tell me you have to convert the particular USB to another format other than default. Someone else I noticed said that a USB conversion wasn't necessary. I all want to know is how to make a proper backup of my files onto a flash drive which I will have in case I may need it in the future.

Thank you

A disk image can be several GB.
- Small USB flash drive (up to 32G) is normally formatted as Fat32 but Fat32 has a file size limit of 4G, so it can't be used to store a disk image.
- External HDD or big USB flash drive (32G up) is normally formatted as NTFS or exfat.

So the first question is what you intent to use as the backup drive?

First, I would not recommend using a USB flash drive for a full system image backup. I would recommend using a USB hard drive or SSD instead. But, if you really want to use a usb flash drive, you will probably need one 128 GB or larger in size. I recommend you create a rescue drive with Macrium Reflect Free:
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

The USB flash drive created for the rescue drive should be MBR partition type with a FAT32 partition 32 GB in size, marked as active. This will make the flash drive universally bootable in both legacy BIOS (CSM) and UEFI modes. Then you will want to shrink that FAT32 partition down to about 1 GB in size. Create a second partition on the flash drive to fill the rest of it and format that as NTFS.

Then you can boot the new computer from the USB flash drive into Macrium Reflect Free and create a backup image of the internal hard drive or SSD and save the image onto the NTFS partition on the flash drive.

You can do the same thing with a USB external hard drive or SSD and it is much faster and more reliable than a flash drive.

Samuria said:

First it's simpler and safer to automatically backup to the cloud using OneDrive or Google sync. For USB it would be depend on the size of the drive

This seems easier than a flash drive. How exactly do I do this?

Peppercrunch said:

This seems easier than a flash drive. How exactly do I do this?

It is the same process but instead of storing on a external drive you upload to a cloud storage.
As the image can be from 20 to 50G (depends on your data size) to upload the image file can take days.
And a large storage space will cost you money. (US$70 /year for 100G)
Sign in - Google Accounts

I recommend to store your image on an external HDD or external SSD

Megahertz said:

I recommend to store your image on an external HDD or external SSD

I agree. Cloud storage is good for individual files such as documents and photos. Not quite there yet for backing up entire drive images.

The computer I have coming is loaded with Windows 10 Pro. I'll be honest, my main concern is losing the apps that are installed by the people who refurbished it before it comes to me. If for some reason I need to reset my PC, I'm afraid of losing all of the pre-installed apps. I don't know exactly what they will already have installed with this computer though. Below is a link to Amazon showing the computer I'm waiting for.

Amazon.ca