New
#11
Thanks, cereberus. I was able to open the .iso file in Explorer. What is curious is the new boot.win file in Sources is 158 Mb. The old one on my USB stick, created in 2/2017, is 256 Mb.
An inexpensive 4GB Thumb Drive is all you need to create a Rescue for Macrium. You can also add an entry to the Boot Menu if you wish, so it is accessible without the thumb drive. No need to use a 256GB hard drive for anything, except storing your actual backup images. Yes, you can stick the ISO data on a small un-lettered partition some where on the main drive, but that is not normally done. All the options you need are right in the options of Macrium. You can create a DVD instead of a thumb, if you wish.
But isn't more convenient to have the USB hard drive bootable into Macrium Reflect? I mean what is the advantage to having a USB flash drive recovery that you have to boot with, then replace that with the hard drive the image is on in order to restore it? (other than, I suppose, it is much easier to create the first time).
We seem to have two threads at once running through this discussion. In my case, at least, using a USB stick for recovery booting is what makes sense for two reasons.
The main one is that I backup three different laptops to the same USB hard drives. The laptops are different so their recovery files will be different too. One is Windows 7. The others are different brands with some different drivers. Each one gets its own USB recovery stick. (Ok, if someone can tell me I'm wrong on this and only need one recovery USB for all my machine, I will be delighted.)
The second reason, which would apply if I only had one machine, is that with multiple USB backup hard drives, every time there was an update to the recovery files, I'd have to update every backup hard drive's recovery files separately.
I prefer to use a separate partition rather than use Macrium's own method because you can delete the "boot" folder it creates, as that uses nearly 1GB of space. Also, if C drive files get corrupted, the partition method still works. Of course, you still need a flash drive in case hard drive(s) fail.
@Randysea
In general, your are correct in your statement. My DT and my SP3 are quite different (drivers, etc) and have separate Rescue media. If the machines are identical, in all aspects, then of course a Rescue could be shared.
I think what makes sense to you is what you should do. It's a perfectly normal scenario.