Using Macrium to back up dual boot PC?

martinlest said:

Well, I am not going to delete them: I've only got to frown at my PCs and they rebel against me!! If I start removing recovery partitions, that would trigger some catastrophe or other, I just know it! I don't need the space especially anyway.

I am now wondering whether it might be 'cleverer', thinking of a situation in which I might need to restore a disc image, if (having installed Macrium into Windows 11 as well) I backed up the relevant Windows 11 only partitions using Macrium in Windows 10, and the Windows 10 partitions in Macrium/Windows 11. That way, I'm not putting all of my eggs into one basket and there should be no need to reinstall an O/S, just boot into the good O/S and restore the failed one from there. That's assuming both physical SSDs/discs didn't fail and the boot record is intact of course..

Or is there a flaw there somewhere??

I would store your backups on Disk 2 at minimum. And also on an external drive if you have one.
You shouldn't store the backups on the Windows Disks.

If one of those disks fails, you don't want to lose your backups.

martinlest said:

Yes, I guess you're right - both Disks 0 & 1 are Windows discs here (and I don't want to use Disk 2 for image backups). May be better to create images directly onto a reliable external HDD, though I am always wary of that, as they all connect via USB(3.0), which (USB) I have always found to be potentially flaky/unreliable, especially when it comes to restoring an image file from such a drive ("... blah, blah, not recognised/valid.. etc etc.)

Can I copy and paste a completed image folder to an external drive, BTW, and have it work reliably for restore purposes? I have memories in the distant past that the resulting copy was often not recognised by the imaging software (may have been Acronis).

Yeah. Copy/paste them anywhere you want, other than the Windows Disks.
If you need to restore... you might have to browse to where ever you saved them. But they will work fine.

martinlest said:

OK.. I've made two backups now, on an external HDD: one for Windows 10, one for 11. Trust I'll never have to use them!

Thanks for the input

Don't forget to make the bootable rescue Media, so you can get to your backups even if Windows won't boot.