Win10 Recovery USB Drive and/or Disk Image - Which is better

[KLund1]

I got a 128GB USB drive to make a win10x64 recovery disk.
When I started, the brand new empty drive had only 110GB free. OK I only have about 34gb on the concerned laptop used. I made a Recovery disk from the MS windows 10 build- in tools. When it was done, it formatted the drive to fat32, so it only now had a total of 32GB. 22Gb is used for the recovery disk files. So there is also not enough room to make a Recovery Disk Image.
Several questions
- Can I convert the drive back to NTSC and still be bootable and usable for recovery. If so how?
- Which is better to have? A recovery disk or a disk image? Though I really want to have both on the same drive. I think this would be best so I get two options in case of disaster. Any way to do it with this 128GB(110Gb) USB drive.
The laptop is just the way I want it. I just finished installing all the stuff I want, and set it up just right for me. But I have not used it for normal work yet.

 

[USAFRet]

If you're only using 34GB on your C drive, this is what I would do.

Several of the current imaging applications will do a full drive image, off to that USB.
Being only 34GB, you can actually store 2 images, in different folders.


So...
Retrun that 128GB to its full size. NFTS.
Then, with Macrium Reflect, you can create an image of that drive. Being ~34GB, an image with that tool will only consume about 30GB.
So now you have a baseline image, of the system as it is today.

Now comes the fun part.
You can cause Macrium to do another image, on a schedule. Given that size, it will still fit.
You can cause it to redo this image daily, or weekly, or whatever frequency you choose.
It will delete the oldest on in this folder if the drive is below X% free space.

So you will have at least two images.
One now, and one rolling image.

Now...you will also need another USB stick...a small one.
On this, you create a Macrium Rescue.
In case of need, you boot from this Rescue USB, tell it which image you wish to recover, and what internal drive you wish to recover it to.


I hope this was semi clear...

 

[KLund1]

Many thanks for such a quick reply.
You were very clear.
The main reason I got such a large drive was to eliminate your solution of having 2 separate USB drives for recovery.
Do you have a suggestion on using only 1 drive to have both solutions available? (recovery, base image, & ongoing image)
Thanks again!

 

[USAFRet]

Many thanks for such a quick reply.
You were very clear.
The main reason I got such a large drive was to eliminate your solution of having 2 separate USB drives for recovery.
Do you have a suggestion on using only 1 drive to have both solutions available? (recovery, base image, & ongoing image)
Thanks again!

I don't know of a 'single USB' solution off the top of my head.
It will require something to boot from...the Recovery USB.