Once again Macrium Reflect has saved me. The short story version is that a situation created by yours truly, saw me have to perform a "Restore" earlier this morning. Reaching for my 8.0 gig USB stick (which replaced my restore CD - which I still retain just in case), I commenced the restore operation.
This time I decided to copy down some specific information for those who may be interested i.e. size and time taken.
My PC is a desktop unit, i5 cpu, 8.0gig RAM 3 HD's with Windows 10 - 64 bit - drive C is a 120gig Samsung EVO SSD - standard upgrade from 8.1.1 to Win 10 - I have Macrium Reflect (free version) perform a "Full" backup of drive "C" daily at 4.00pm - Windows explorer shows me that the last daily backup .mrimg file size is 40,740,967 KB.
Once booting from my USB flash drive and choosing which backup file to use for my restore from the Macrium Reflect menu I proceeded as directed.
By the time I had made my coffee and got back to the PC I caught the Macrium Reflect dialogue box whilst it was performing TRIM which read the following:
13 minutes from disaster to glory - you got to be happy with that.
and at 13 minutes for a full restore, and about half that for the original backup image to be taken, you have to ask yourself, why wouldn't you do that as part of your backup regime?
and imagine if everyone did, there would hardly be a need for recovery software.
I always find it fascinating how fast Macrium Reflect is, it creates a full drive C: backup of my system to another internal hard disk in 4 minutes (when the faster beginning area of the hard disk has available space), and about 5-6 minutes (when the hard disk only has available space in the slower near the end areas).
Restoration is under 40 minutes - probably must less time than that because I've never actually timed it since when I come back it's always done and successful.
I finally got around to creating a Macrium Reflect full backup of my mother's Win10 Dell laptop last night.
Macrium had something in it to backup everything needed for the operating system. I however only chose drive C:\. On a Win10 system is it alright to only backup drive C:\, or do I actually have to backup all of those other factory created partitions?
Andavari I originally had the same question so I tested it on my test PC which was a Win 10 32 bit Test box, Did this when Win 10 first arrived and prior to running on my main box. I did it both ways, drive C only at first, then with all the partitions that Win 10 creates. I aslo did a restore of both, , honestly I'm not really sure of the the different final result, I could not or did not experience any issues. However the time between both backup/restore exercises was only 2 days and all I did was some basic internet work, TV capture/edit & conversion. Did not run into a problem. I have since blown that OS away to mess with other OS's.
So when it came to my so-called "mission critical" box I elected to follow the Macrium Reflect default backup regime and include all of the 3 partitions created by Win 10.
The only step I missed mentioning in my post the other day was that I did do a "verify" prior to the restore. I even backup my test box once a week as data storage I maintain is very cost effective.
I'll backup all of those in the screenshot, which will be happening soon in about an hour or so.
I had to cleanup the computer allot "spyware-ish" cookies. After running CCleaner just once it makes it boot significantly faster, and it's also usable faster. Had to manually install the MVPS hosts file since their installer fails, which was verified when I checked with HostsExpert (sadly the developer website is gone, but I have HostsExpert archived).