Why a 32GB USB Drive for Recovery?

I have upgraded a Win 7 and a Win 8 computers to Win 10. On the Win 7 I used an 8 GB USB Drive for Recovery and it did not use all of the space. On the Win 8 computer I'm getting a message that I need a 32 GB drive. I understand that it may also be backing up my Win 8 information, but 32 GB seems way too much. Any ideas on why this is necessary? I hate to waste money on a drive that is not needed.

Thank you,

Hi,

Presumably that depends on what is already on the system drive.
So far I get away with 8Gb usb sticks as a recovery drive for every single Win 10 install I've done but I admit to "trimming" the OS to the bare minimum.
Still I guess a 16Gb stick should do the trick for any regular W10 install.

Cheers,

How much HDD space is your windows 8 PC using ??
Figure half or a little more for a System backup..

My system backup using Marcium reflect is 23GB

Hi,

This is my wife's computer and for the first time I took a look at her disk drive setup. Since she only has put a little stuff on the drive, I did not bother checking it before. What I now see is the Windows (C:) showing 337 free out of 441 GB total. I also see a Recovery (D:) with 2.21 of 22.4 GB. When I attempted to open this drive/folder it said it was a HP Recovery partition, and dated in 2014. I did not realize that the C drive had this partition in it.

So it seems that Windows Recovery wants to save this partition which would account for the larger USB drive it is calling for.

Since the HP Recovery partition is based on Win 8, I wonder if it should be deleted or saved, as her computer is now running Win 10, and I have no intention of rolling it back to win 8?

Thanks for your help.

441-337=104GB used drive space.. Plus a 20GB Factory Recovery Partition..

I would assume the C:\ drive has a windows.old folder that is taking up a lot of disk space..

Right Click on drive icon - select properties - select disk cleanup - then select cleanup system files and check all boxes

Thank you. I'll give that a try and then the Recovery Drive procedure again.

Hi,

I'd still make a backup of that Recovery partition and put it on an external drive, USB stick or whatever you have that fits the bill prior to discarding it.
Then you can safely delete that partition, expand the C:\ drive if that's in front of the empty space or just create a new partition and use that for data storage or whatever.

I never seize to be amazed by the number of OEM's that preconfigure their systems with such enormous C:\ drive partitions. Come to think of it we have MS to blame for that as well.
After a few years of use that system drive is total chaos and everyone starts complaining about how slow that computer has become.....
Guess they're just pushing the ignorant punter to the shops to buy new gear, right ?

Cheers.