Is there any reason for me to create a Windows recovery USB drive if I already have a Macrium Reflect rescue USB drive and a set of solid images? If anything goes wrong I can always restore an image, so I’m not sure what additional protections a Windows recover drive would offer.
If you create your own backup images, either with windows built in system image tool, or a 3rd party tool, that should be sufficient for most situations.
If you have added data to your drive since the last image, you may lose that during image restore. There is away round that if you used windows system image for example, and there are a few 3rd party imaging tools with options to avoid overwriting more recent data.
Here is an example from O&O Disk Image tool:
Thanks SIW2. I use the free version of Macrium Reflect 7.1 to create system images so I’m covered there. I was just wondering if the Windows recovery drive offered any additional troubleshooting tools vs. the Macrium Reflect rescue drive that would make it worth the time to create and maintain. I know you can use the Windows recovery drive to reinstall/reset Windows, but I can’t think of a reason I would want to do that if I had a good Macrium system image to restore.
Are you talking about barebones recovery drive, as that does not really add much benefit over using an installation drive created using media creation tool.
If you are talking about the built in image backup tool, then it is inferior to Macrium, and also is a deprecated feature to be removed. MS recommend use of 3rd party tools now.
I never bother with anything but Macrium images.
I was talking about the Windows Recovery Drive that you can create by entering Create a Recovery Drive in the search box.
I used to use the built-in Windows System Image Backup (SIB) tool but switched to Macrium Reflect when I found out SIB was being deprecated in Windows v1709. When I was using SIB I had a good reason to have an up-to-date Windows recovery drive. Now that I switched to Macrium Reflect, I was wondering if there was any value in keeping the Windows recovery drive around. The Macrium Reflect rescue drive seems to be all that is needed.
I use a hybrid recovery drive. I create a standard Windows 10 Installation USB flash drive using the Media Creation Tool. Then I replace the boot.wim file in the Sources folder with boot.wim from Macrium Reflect Rescue Drive. I end up with a USB flash drive that boots into the Macrium Rescue environment - but I can also use the same flash drive to do a clean install of Windows 10 or do a repair install of Windows 10 by running setup.exe from it.
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