Macrium - Setup Macrium Rescue to boot from an Internal SSD

1. Cleans up WinSxS folder securely to reduce the component store size. In addition, this command should be run after every major Windows Updates.
2. Cleanup all temp files/set up files/Windows Updates etc....
3. Some Applications written with Dot Net and won't run without Net Framework. Better to add this feature to avoid conflict and unable to add the feature later on.
   For example: Showkey - Windows 10 Forums
   developed by @Superfly

A question: is there any difference or issue with imaging from within the OS vs imaging from the recovery environment?

No, but always keep the backup file on a separate drive (external and/or removable preferred)

The first command (reduce component size) took about 5 mins to run. I thought it was broken but it was steadily making progress. That was on an SSD with a 4790k quad core!

I have the same 4790K quad. This is normal when you run the first time, takes a while to clean up and reclaim quite a bit of space. If you re-run the command now, it should come back 100% clean almost instantly. I always run it after every major update to make sure the component store is clean.

I always create backup online and have no problem. Make sure to run "Verify" after creating backup. Only boot from Rescue disk is to restore the image

Icarus said:

Yeah, i saw the verify option (wasn't in my old free version of macrium (2 years old lol). Nice touch and it only adds 10 seconds to verify.

And yes Kyhi, my images go to the same, non OS SSD which also have the recovery partition on to boot into macrium. Tidy I would say :)

I would still advise backing up to an external drive preferably, because if you got some sort of power surge etc, it could fry all the internal drives. Ok low probability, but not zero. Also, once disk is removed, no possibility of accidentally formatting wrong disk.

Actually, I do a sort of halfway house. I back up regularly to an internal drive and every so often, copy the backups to an external drive., accepting that occasionally I might have to reinstall a couple of programs, and update anti-virus stuff, redo some windows update etc.

I always keep my data in a separate partition to my OS and programs (keeps images lean and mean), backing the data separately as required (mostly recorded videos and rarely critical). I backup critical data to cloud semi-automatically as well.

Icarus said:

Yeah. I have a NAS. Once a week I'll drop am image there, and delete my daily on the SSD

Cheers for all the advice and help guys

This is perfect for differential or incremental imaging i.e. you make the full backup once a week, which you copy to your NAS, and then do scheduled daily differential or incremental imaging to your internal drive. At worst, you would only lose one days data.

Of course if the actual data is on a separate drive, better to use File History Backup rather than imaging the data, and can schedule backups to be as low as (say) 15 minutes, then you would lose hardly any data at all. You would hardly notice the backups going on unless really big files.