Question validity of saved OS images

[chris2023]

It's said you can downgrade a Windows 11 computer to Windows 10. Not sure why anyone would want to, but if you made Clonezilla images of your initial install, the S to Home conversion, and subsequemrly the reversion to Windows 10 (and conceivably 1 more S to Home conversion), does each image invalidate all the prior images? Not sure why someone would want to go back to S mode, but possibly an 11 to 10 back to 11 situation is very possible.

The question is omce you reinstall a previous image and go online, are M$s servers likely to get their panties in a wad and shut you down.

 

[USAFRet]

No, the MS activation server farm should not have an issue with this.
I do this for every major change. Hardware, or for instance changing from Win 11 S mode to Win 11 Home.

Now...CloneZilla.
How and where are you saving these Images?

I use Macrium Reflect for this. Each Image results in a single file. whatever.mrimg.
I've not used CloneZilla in years. I found Macrium to be a much better tool, for both Clones and backup Images.

 

[chris2023]

Clonezilla is not very intuotive, but I've managed it somehow. It's never given me a problem. Except once where I was saving a very old Windows 10 image, which reported "errors" of some sort, and I allowed Clonezilla to "fix" them, which was a mistake. But I had previously saved an image of that very same hard drive prior to that without any error correcrion, and that image was restorable. But the Windows 10 recovery partition looked weird in Explorer. Or it created another weird looking partition. But I was able to recover to the original factory state. So everything worked quite well.

And if I umderstand your question they get saved to a thumb drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Clonezilla is not very intuotive, but I've managed it somehow. It's never given me a problem. Except once where I was saving a very old Windows 10 image, which reported "errors" of some sort, and I allowed Clonezilla to "fix" them, which was a mistake. But I had previously saved an image of that very same hard drive prior to that without any error correcrion, and that image was restorable. But the Windows 10 recovery partition looked weird in Explorer. Or it created another weird looking partition. But I was able to recover to the original factory state. So everything worked quite well.

And if I umderstand your question they get saved to a thumb drive.

I used to use CZ a lot.
I've moved to Macrium because it is much more feature rich.

Incremental/differential
scheduling
mount an Image to a drive letter, and browse to retrieve a single file
Cloning to a drive or partition smaller than the source
Saving multiple Images to the same drive or folder tree

It is the basis for my whole backup routine.

But again to your question - There should not be an issue going back and using an image created previously.
Valid OS + valid Windows license, and in the same system.

 

[chris2023]

And waited until now to save images of Windows 10 and 11 laptops, both newly converted from S mode to Home (and this was done in both cases with the OS restored to factory new state). Clonezilla reports unclean files system, files system has errors, windows in hibernated state. None of that should be accurate. I knew the gods would be angered if I switcjed out of S mode!

And I'm not using those units until I can produce restorable images. Which is a bummer. Can't understand why it happened to both. Maybe a substantial update is required once you cross over to the dark side?

 

[USAFRet]

And waited until now to save images of Windows 10 and 11 laptops, both newly converted from S mode to Home (and this was done in both cases with the OS restored to factory new state). Clonezilla reports unclean files system, files system has errors, windows in hibernated state. None of that should be accurate. I knew the gods would be angered if I switcjed out of S mode!

And I'm not using those units until I can produce restorable images. Which is a bummer. Can't understand why it happened to both. Maybe a substantial update is required once you cross over to the dark side?

And on my Surface Go, that came as Win 11 S....

(using Macrium Reflect)
Created an Image of the original as it came out of the box.
Updated it to Win 11 Home.
Created an Image of the Win 11 Home.

Did a full restore of the Win 11 Home to test the process.
Zero problems, zero errors.

 

[chris2023]

So I take it this is run from within the computer you're backing up, all the while connected to the internet. Is there a way of running this offline? The download seemed small, 5.7mb. I used my phone.

Maybe a newer version of 'zilla will work.

 

[USAFRet]

So I take it this is run from within the computer you're backing up, all the while connected to the internet. Is there a way of running this offline? The download seemed small, 5.7mb. I used my phone.

Maybe a newer version of 'zilla will work.

With Macrium, the system does not need to be online at all.
It can work completely disconnected.
You just need to have some other storage device to save the Image to.

CloneZilla is/was good for direct cloning.
Not so much for backup Images.

And even for cloning, other tools such as Macrium do it better.