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Formatting Ext Hard Drive for System Image
I'm using Windows 10 version 1909. If I want to make a system image, can I format the external drive using NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT? Do all three formats work?
I'm using Windows 10 version 1909. If I want to make a system image, can I format the external drive using NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT? Do all three formats work?
FAT32 isn't likely to accept a file the size of a typical image file.
I think Exfat would work, but the simplest thing is to just use NTFS as you probably do for your Windows drive.
What are you going to use to make the image? I hope something other than the Windows tool.
I hope it's Macrium, or equivalent. Not the Windows Native old Win 7 backup.
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free
NTFS for sure with images of this size, multi gig. (Mine is 28GB compressed to 16GB)
If you really want to get fancy, make about a 2 GB FAT32 partition at the front and put your recovery software there, followed by an NTFS partition for the rest of the drive. Then you can just boot the computer from the same external hard drive and recover the image, all from the same drive.