Windows 10 System Image

Bree said:

No one said it was easy - just possible

Yes, that's why I focused my answer on the OP's question. Can he mount and use Macrium images, etc. Didn't see any reason to confuse the issue for him, as he's all new to this. Came from XP.

reelme said:

OP back here. Before I head off to the store to get an external drive and a flash drive just making sure one more time about this. I re-read through this entire post and think I now understand that I will be using Reflect Free and will be creating an image and not a clone. I will be saving this image in case I have a hard drive failure at which time I can restore from this saved image to a new hard drive. I know i probably sound like an idiot making a simple thing hard but I have never done this so I think it is finally sinking in. Thanks for the help and the patience to help novices.

You've got it! The image is not just for if you have a drive failure. You can restore that image if your system, the OS, gets botched. You would boot from the flash drive you're getting ready to buy and restore the image from the ext drive you're getting ready to buy. When you get ready to put it all together, lot's here can help. Gotta make the Rescue Thumb drive (flash) as part of your setup. You're on the right track.

reelme said:

So off I go. I am going to get a 1TB external drive and probably a 16GB USB flash drive which I think will be plenty for the recovery media. Thanks again.

8gb is plenty. Even 4gb, but they're getting kinda rare.

Here's what will be on it. Not very big.

I was at Best Buy and saw that the USB 2.0 flash drives were way cheaper than the 3.0. Since this would just be for a recovery media is 2.0 okay? Doesn't seem like speed would be the issue at that point anyways.

Also, the external hard drives (Western Digital for example) come loaded with their software that I will not be using. Should I format the drive to wipe this out or just ignore it?

reelme said:

I was at Best Buy and saw that the USB 2.0 flash drives were way cheaper than the 3.0. Since this would just be for a recovery media is 2.0 okay? Doesn't seem like speed would be the issue at that point anyways.

Also, the external hard drives (Western Digital for example) come loaded with their software that I will not be using. Should I format the drive to wipe this out or just ignore it?

@reelme USB 2.0 flash drive for Rescue media is just fine. Will boot fine, and probably with less chance of error. You're booting from the BIOS, so any speed advantage in a USB 3.0 would be ignored anyway. The bundled software is almost always the manufacturers backup software they want you to use. It's basically worthless. Copy it off somewhere if you want to keep it, then delete it from the ext drive. No need to format the drive, it should already be NTFS.

TC