Make external USB HDD into all-in-1 win8 personal recovery ssystem

[diapolical]

Perhaps there is someone who can advise me here.

I am using my 2tb external USB hdd as a storage device for work data. I want this HDD to be able to restore my windows 8 with all my installed programs if the version on the laptop ever fails.
I have already backed up all my films, documents and music etc.

The thing that I need to work out is
1.How do you put the Windows 8 recovery onto this hdd and make it bootable without deleting any of the data already there?
2. How do you make a custom system image that includes all the programs I have installed (win8 just wants to make an image of the recovery partition that came with the laptop)
It needs to be an image of a type that the Windows Recovery Disk would recognize and be able to restore to the laptop's HDD.

NEW PARTITION ON THE EXTERNAL HDD?
I could make a new partition there easily enough if necessary, where I could put the boot and recovery programs. It wouldn't have to be more than 1GB.
Or I could make a bigger partition, more than 16gb, where I could put the boot and recovery programs AND the system image. But it seems Win8 won't make the image I want automatically.

Maybe I can manually transfer the contents of the recovery DVD or USB drive, after making the drive bootable and adding other necessary files?

Finding out if the laptop will actually boot from this HDD is something I will do myself later on (it DOES boot from a USB stick, but maybe not a 2tb HDD)

I should add that I travel internationally all the time, I am a documentary film maker, and I have to keep my gear at a minimum, so I want to put everything on this one hdd, if possible (USB drives and SD cards get lost).

Advice would be appreciated.

 

[dodger46]

System Image probably easiest to create, but not always the easiest to recover from. See no reason why you can't have both, use EaseUs Partition Master to create a 16Gb Partition at the 'front' of your Ext HDD and place your Recovery there.
If you're running 8.1 then System Image Backup can be found in File History.

http://www.easeus.com/download/epmf-download.html

(Beware 'extra; unwanted software...)

Open the Manager and select your Ext, Drive, then 'Resize'. Move the slider on the left of the drive the requisite amount to accommodate your Recovery Partition, then 'OK' etcetera followed by 'Apply'

Then create new simple volume to give it a drive letter, and when you create your Recovery choose said letter...

 

[diapolical]

I simply cannot get FileHistory to work, it is disabled and I have read everything I can on the net to get it enabled but it will not work.
I'm not banging my head against that wall any longer.

So I need a program that will create an image of my OS including all the installed updates and programs, but will allow me to exclude my documents, films photo and all other data that is not necessary for programs. (I can restore those simply by copying)

And of course the program that makes this image must provide a bootable ISO that allows me to restore the image.

Then I will transfer this bootable CD/DVD ISO and the image to the external HDD.

 

[diapolical]

In the end I got Acronis True Image 2014.
I will make an Acronis image of the windows partition and store it on an external hdd.
You can specify that certain folders are NOT INCLUDED in the image, so I will exclude all the folders that are not part of the OS and not needed by other installed software (i.e. all my personal stuff)
It is best to have .NET framework 4.5 installed, otherwise the folder exclusion might not work.

This image shows the syntax needed in the partition imaging process in order to exclude directories from the image

Then I will make a bootable Acronis CD, that I will use to restore the OS to a new HDD in the laptop if the one in the computer crashes.
I have given up the idea, for now at least, of putting a recovery-type OS on the external HDD, I will just use the CD to boot if the internal HDD ever dies.

 

[dodger46]

A useful response, but can't understand why System Image Backup failed to work. Presumably you had the external drive connected, with the empty partition available. I wondered if my setup worked because I have an internal drive for use as a backup, so I replicated your situation with an external, albeit a smaller one than yours, but met no problems whatsoever...

 

[dodger46]

Had to re-install 8.1 on a customer's laptop, tried to create a System Image and couldn't even find File History! It transpired that File History appeared after all Updates for 8.1 had been installed, so perhaps you will be able to create a System Image once your machine is up-to-date...

 

[diapolical]

I am still successfully using Acronis to make backups of my windows partition and to record all the partition information on the hd (I back up the non-OS data, mainly photos and videos, in the hdd partition just by copying them to an external hdd).
The windows installation did get corrupted once and was impossible to repair but I restored the whole partition using an Acronis boot cd then pointing it at a recovery image on the external hdd. It was straightforward and perfectly successful. I have no interest now in getting windows native backup system to work.