Can Macruim Reflect make a backup of Bootable windows Thumb drive

sam9 · 18 Dec 2015

I have a bootable windows installation Thumb Drive. Can Macrium make a backup of this thumb drive so in the event of this thumb drive going faulty, I could make another Thumb drive with the backup image.

Edwin · 18 Dec 2015

sam9 said:

I have a bootable windows installation Thumb Drive. Can Macrium make a backup of this thumb drive so in the event of this thumb drive going faulty, I could make another Thumb drive with the backup image.

Why not just save the media from which you created the current one?

topgundcp · 18 Dec 2015

sam9 said:

I have a bootable windows installation Thumb Drive. Can Macrium make a backup of this thumb drive so in the event of this thumb drive going faulty, I could make another Thumb drive with the backup image.

Macrium Interface only lists all available SSD/HDD, not thumb drive so the answer is NO.

All you need is using: 7-Zip, WinZip, Winrar, Untra ISO ... to create a single compressed file then store it somewhere. To put it back to another thumb drive, just unzip it.

sam9 · 19 Dec 2015

topgundcp said:

Macrium Interface only lists all available SSD/HDD, not thumb drive so the answer is NO.

All you need is using: 7-Zip, WinZip, Winrar, Untra ISO ... to create a single compressed file then store it somewhere. To put it back to another thumb drive, just unzip it.

You mean, save the files of thumb drive as a .rar file and extract the files in other thumb drive. Will this copy the boot image and make the other drive a successful bootable thumb drive because people says that copy and paste does not make the other thumb drive bootable and this method is also just like copy and paste.

topgundcp · 19 Dec 2015

You mean, save the files of thumb drive as a .rar file and extract the files in other thumb drive. Will this copy the boot image and make the other drive a successful bootable thumb drive because people says that copy and paste does not make the other thumb drive bootable and this method is also just like copy and paste.

Use any file compression utils as mentioned above and it'll work. Just format the stick with FAT32 then extract to it.

RolandJS · 19 Dec 2015

Unless I'm incorrectly reading between the lines of the respondents to your OP:
I think you'll be making an ISO off of your current usb stick. That ISO can be placed onto another usb stick.

topgundcp · 19 Dec 2015

RolandJS said:

Unless I'm incorrectly reading between the lines of the respondents to your OP:
I think you'll be making an ISO off of your current usb stick. That ISO can be placed onto another usb stick.

True. You can make an ISO, rar, zip, 7-zip off the stick. Then use one of the utils to unzip back to the new stick fomatted with FAT32 for compatibility with the old version of EFI firmware.

sam9 · 19 Dec 2015

topgundcp said:

Use any file compression utils as mentioned above and it'll work. Just format the stick with FAT32 then extract to it.

If it is so simple then why do we need special utilities to create bootable windows thumb drive. Why can't we simply compress the windows installation disk files to a single file and then extract to thumb drive.

Berton · 19 Dec 2015

sam9 said:

If it is so simple then why do we need special utilities to create bootable windows thumb drive. Why can't we simply compress the windows installation disk files to a single file and then extract to thumb drive.

Creating bootable drives/discs requires having a couple or few, usually hidden, files on them that allow the computer to run the process. Compressing files for storage on other media is fairly common but they can't be used until they are decompressed either to the same media if sufficient capacity or to other media.