[SOLVED] What's the best "restore point" method?

Jun 14, 2021
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Finished building my first pc, now wondering what's the best way to save it's current state? I created a restore point yesterday but it seems like it's not there anymore for some reason, making me feel nervous.

Looked around on youtube and many seems to suggest various softwares and many different answers. Is there a definitive and best one to use? If all else fails, how exactly do i format everything completely to 0 and do a fresh windows install?
 
Solution
There is no singular "best", but I use Macrium Reflect for exactly this.
It is one of those applications that 'just works'.




If all else fails, how exactly do i format everything completely to 0 and do a fresh windows install?

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
There is no singular "best", but I use Macrium Reflect for exactly this.
It is one of those applications that 'just works'.




If all else fails, how exactly do i format everything completely to 0 and do a fresh windows install?
 
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Solution

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Thank you for this! I will give it a try.
And I have had to use that to recover from a totally dead SSD.
960GB drive, 605GB data.

Put in a new drive, click click...all 605GB recovered exactly as it was at 4AM that morning, when the nightly incremental was run for that drive.
IIRC took about 90 minutes from my NAS, across the LAN, to my system and the new drive.
 
Jun 14, 2021
18
1
15
And I have had to use that to recover from a totally dead SSD.
960GB drive, 605GB data.

Put in a new drive, click click...all 605GB recovered exactly as it was at 4AM that morning, when the nightly incremental was run for that drive.
IIRC took about 90 minutes from my NAS, across the LAN, to my system and the new drive.

Sorry if i'm understanding this wrong, but is it mainly to clone a storage to another storage? Can it be used to create a state to recover from and put it in a usb?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Sorry if i'm understanding this wrong, but is it mainly to clone a storage to another storage? Can it be used to create a state to recover from and put it in a usb?
Clone and Image are two different things, for two different purposes.

A clone would be used to transfer the whole set of data to a new drive, to use right now.
An Image is used to stash away for future use, in case the system gets corrupted or the drive dies.

A clone consumes the entirety of the target drive, and Image results in a single file, leaving the rest of the target drive usable for whatever.

Further, you can create Incremental or Differential images, daily or weekly.
A Full Image, then a series of Incrementals....you can recover the system from whatever date in the past. Say...before the BadThing happened.


A USB? Well, you could.
But that would require a flash drive of sufficient size.
An external HDD or a NAS is far better.

All my house systems write an Image nightly or weekly, to a single folder tree on my NAS.
I can recover any system, or any drive individually, from any data in the last month.
 
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USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
For instance...
If I wanted to swap out my current 500GB C drive for a 1TB, clone, and swap the physical drives.

Images, I can store all the data, from all house systems (a dozen or so individual drives) on a single 8TB HDD.
Individually and fully recoverable to some replacement drive, or overwrite the existing drive.
 
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