Best Solution For OS Recovery

I have my data and my OS on separate drives. I back up my data regularly to an external drive.

My question related to OS drive recovery only.

I'm really confused as to what is the best way to be able to recover a corrupted OS, e.g. as a result of a faulty windows update. Today, when restarting after an update, it went into a "Something didn't go as planned. No need to worry. Undoing changes" This just kept looping and after a couple of hours, I had to power the PC off and then restart with recovery options. I eventually got it sorted, but it took a lot of time.

My question is, what is the preferred action when you have an OS issue e.g. via a bad update? I've seen some posts saying create a recovery drive and others say create a system image drive.

One or more of these links may be useful:












Consider making a free backup image.
Save the backup image to another disk drive or to the cloud.
If there is malware, ransomware, registry or operating system corruption, update problems, failure to boot, etc. you then have the option to restore the image.

(Acronis, Aoemi, EaseUS, Hasleo, Macrium, Paragon, etc.)

Macrium is widely used in Ten Forums.

Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything


Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

mapoutline said:

My question is, what is the preferred action when you have an OS issue e.g. via a bad update? I've seen some posts saying create a recovery drive and others say create a system image drive.

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A "system image" is a file, not a drive. A big one; could be 50 or 100 gigabytes, or much more.


You say "when you have an OS issue".............


Creating an image AFTER you have an issue doesn't help you. You need to create an image BEFORE, not "when".

If you ever decide to create an image to bail you out from a future issue, you should definitely also create a "recovery drive" on a USB stick so that you can boot into the recovery software if your existing hard drive isn't bootable at all.

If you are already in a jam and don't have an image to restore, you have to use other measures...that might be System Restore; or manual trouble shooting, or even a new Window install if the problem is severe. Image restoration has probably a 99 percent chance of success, which is why it is so valuable in these circumstances. With any luck, you'd be back up and running within an hour.

Like you, I have a dedicated OS drive and a data drive. Both are SSDs - 256Gb and 2Tb. I use Macrium Reflect free edition to make an image of my C drive twice a week using an automated Macrium schedule. One on Tuesday at 9am (before patch Tuesday) which is written to my data drive.,and one on Saturday which goes to Onedrive. (I have an MS365 licence courtesy of my daughter which gives me 1Tb of cloud storage). My image backups are usually around 50 Gb.

mapoutline said:

My question is, what is the preferred action when you have an OS issue e.g. via a bad update? I've seen some posts saying create a recovery drive and others say create a system image drive.

Click to expand...

Welcome to Eleven Forum.

Another vote here for making a system image. Of zbook's list....

(Acronis, Aoemi, EaseUS, Hasleo, Macrium, Paragon, etc.)

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...Macrium Reflect is the one I like, but the others are good too.

Reflect is paid-for software, and recently switched from perpetual licences to a subscription model. There used to be a Reflect Free, but that has been retired now. Those who want free software speak well of Hasleo.

All imaging software uses compression, the size of system image file it creates is typically 60-70% of the total used data on the drives being imaged.

Although Reflect Free is no longer offered by Macrium, it's still available to download from their servers and still works with the latest Win11 builds. See the link at the bottom of post #1 here for the Reflect Free Download Agent.

Latest Macrium Reflect 8 updates

With your strategy, you are in a uniquely good place. I say this because should you decide to go the route of making a system image, it will be much smaller and therefore faster recovery because you have all your data on a separate drive. This means that the amount of data that you would have to restore in the event of an OS failure is going to be significantly less. On my primary system I use the same strategy. As a result, if I needed to restore the entire OS drive, I could probably do it in well under 10 minutes.

Note that I am not saying that the best thing to do is a disk image backup. There's a lot of things that go into deciding whether you want to go that route, some of which are merely personal preference. I am just saying that if you did want to go that route, you are in a very good position for making that a very effective strategy.

I use Hasleo for system images.

mapoutline said:

My question is, what is the preferred action when you have an OS issue e.g. via a bad update?

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I like PreOS, it is fast, convenient, you do not have to search for a recovery USB.
My OS partition has 30GB, it takes 1 min to create and to restore a system image.

I keep the system drive containing Windows and the OS and data on separate partitions / drives. I use various scheduled Reflect backup tasks to back up the sysem and data partitions and also use file & folder backup for my data files.

Thanks everybody. I will give Macrium a try.