r drive image system image

thanks everyone for your answers,I used r drive image as its easier to understand than macrium,i just thought it would be the same size as my c drive but now i know it gets compressed that makes sense.I was told about external USB HDD,s in another of my posts,I have never heard of them before,that is something i will take a look at next.I did do mt original system mage from windows 10 but someone on this forum advised against it.

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dalchina said:

Hi, it's great you've realised the importance of a good backup regimes. But do you mean you used Backup and Restore (Windows 7) to create the system image?
If so, please don't use this legacy unsupported and sometimes problematic old feature.

Many times here it's been highlighted that MS itself has recommended people use a modern updated and supported program such as Macrium Reflect (free / licensed).

Aomei and Easeus and more also produce disk imaging programs.
These are more robust, reliable and feature-rich.

Disk imaging (of all the partitions comprising your O/S) is recommended here time and again... that's a great start.

After that, any other partitions can similarly be imaged, or backed up by one of the many backup programs around.

Fast-changing data can be backed up by a program that synchronises it.

Imaging a partition means all the used space is copied in a compressed form and stored in a file.
The securest way to do that is to keep those files e.g. on a USB disk stored separately from your PC.
Image files can be mounted, and their content accessed using file explorer as if the files were on a disk.


Please consider saving the image files e.g. to large enough external storage- a 1T or 2Tb USB HDD for example - not an internal drive.

If you do that, you have no protection against ransomeware, viruses, and can't recover if your PC is unbootable.

I have never done back ups before,i would just wipe my hard drive and do a fresh install,I am using windows 10 but i had a lot of problems with the updates,I also was informed the build i was using was old and advised to upgrade,I eventually managed to do it,I did,nt want to go through all this again thats the reason i did the system image,there were 3 partitions and i chose them all because someone said it would restore the hard drive to how it is now.I really hope all the programs will come back from the image too.one of the partitions was called system reserved is there a way you can view them files because i bought this pc 2nd hand and i was using windows 7 on it,I just wondered if it was old windows 7 files in there.

dalchina said:

Point about being able to restore your PC from an image is so that when things go badly wrong you can get it up and running without help.

As to updates- hold back - don't rush to get the latest.

You say you have an Enterprise build - I don't know what group policies are supported on that - on Pro I set updates to notify, so they are not applied until I want them to be.

Other ways to take control of WUpdate using free utilities have been around a long time, often mentioned here. Also 2 tutorials cover this.

yes, i,m using WAU manager which i love and it stops windows from automatic updates