Solved How much space do I need on a micro sd card to do a backup of my SP3? Micro SD reccomendations?

[malberttoo]

And... please correct me on this if needed... the image would only be used on the same device the image came from, or an exact duplicate device: correct?

Mostly, yes. Some applications like TrueImage promise that you can install TI on a totally different machine, and then install an image on that machine from something totally dissimilar. I don't know that I would particularly like that, because then you need TI to be the in-between layer between the image and the hardware, for driver purposes etc.

But mostly I would say an image is intended for use on the same (or identical) machine on which it was made.

 

[leeshor]

Macrium also has something called ReDeploy that will do a bare metal restart to dissimilar hardware. Just an fyi.

 

[Liam2349]

I've been looking at creating a full system image myself. I had an issue yesterday and today it took me 3 hours to fix it - now that I have my SP3 working again, I've created a full system image through Windows for recovery purposes, back to this exact state.

Search for File History. Then in the bottom left, there is an option to create a full system image.

 

[Zog1971]

I've been looking at creating a full system image myself. I had an issue yesterday and today it took me 3 hours to fix it - now that I have my SP3 working again, I've created a full system image through Windows for recovery purposes, back to this exact state.

Search for File History. Then in the bottom left, there is an option to create a full system image.

Thanks for the directions. Was this image as big as your c:drive? I've used 100gb of my c:drive so still trying to determine how big of a backup drive to get.

 

[Liam2349]

Thanks for the directions. Was this image as big as your c:drive? I've used 100gb of my c:drive so still trying to determine how big of a backup drive to get.

It requires about the same space you have used on all of your drives. So it was basically a little bit bigger than space used on my C drive.

You have a couple other small partitions, worth less than 1GB for me.

So my C drive has 112GB used, and the full image is 113GB.

Whatever you store the image on has to be formatted to NTFS. I think a hard disk is the best choice financially.

 

[Zog1971]

It requires about the same space you have used on all of your drives. So it was basically a little bit bigger than space used on my C drive.

You have a couple other small partitions, worth less than 1GB for me.

So my C drive has 112GB used, and the full image is 113GB.

Whatever you store the image on has to be formatted to NTFS. I think a hard disk is the best choice financially.

Thanks for your time. This is exactly what I needed to know. Sounds like I wanna get an actual backup drive as I also want to get a full image rather than just the recovery image (although might but that on a usb or micro sd just in case). I'm gonna mark this thread as solved as this is fully answering my question. Thanks, all, for your responses.

 

[Jesse San Nicolas]

To the OP,

why would you not spring for a Sandisk Ultra 128GB microSDXC? Basically double your storage capacity for about $109 on Amazon, and I seen them go for around $80 on th e bay, and thats for the newer 48MB/s one. Not bad considering a SP3-256GB model cost $300 more than yours.

Or if you want to get the fastest microSD here you go, just released:

Lexar 128GB microSDXC at 95MB/s

 

[rst6616]

I've been looking at creating a full system image myself. I had an issue yesterday and today it took me 3 hours to fix it - now that I have my SP3 working again, I've created a full system image through Windows for recovery purposes, back to this exact state.

Search for File History. Then in the bottom left, there is an option to create a full system image.

I have followed your advise and created an image of my SP3 saved on a usb drive. When I choose Properties for this newly created image file called WindowsImageBackup, it shows zero space.
1) Is this to be expected? How can you determine the actual size of this image?
2) If my system totally crashes, can you provide the procedure to recover my system using this image?
Thanks

 

[Liam2349]

I have followed your advise and created an image of my SP3 saved on a usb drive. When I choose Properties for this newly created image file called WindowsImageBackup, it shows zero space.
1) Is this to be expected? How can you determine the actual size of this image?
2) If my system totally crashes, can you provide the procedure to recover my system using this image?
Thanks

1) I believe it's normal. If you click into it and open the folders, you will find some large files.
2) Go to Start and type "Recovery options". Advanced start-up should allow you to restore from this image.

If it's really bad and you can't boot properly, you might have to first do a standard refresh/reinstall, then recover in step 2 - unless the Surface can boot to the drive that contains this image.

 

[m98custom1212]

Recovery Usb and Onedrive?

 

[Zog1971]

To the OP,

why would you not spring for a Sandisk Ultra 128GB microSDXC? Basically double your storage capacity for about $109 on Amazon, and I seen them go for around $80 on th e bay, and thats for the newer 48MB/s one. Not bad considering a SP3-256GB model cost $300 more than yours.

Or if you want to get the fastest microSD here you go, just released:

Lexar 128GB microSDXC at 95MB/s

I actually have the 256gb model, but I get your point. Yes, now that I know the size a full recovery will require, the 128gb micro sd would be my option if I decide to go with that route. Now that I know I need something that big for the full recovery image, I am also considering just getting an external drive for backups and a smaller micro sd to save some movies and music to. That Lexar looks pretty sweet, though.

 

[Jeff Au]

Just a general question to those who backup an image copy of their drive C to an external storage (using tools like Macrium or TrueImage); do you prefer to save the image backup (including the bootable recovery media) on a thumbdrive or the microSD card?

Or it really doesn't matter and I'm asking a pointless question.

p/s My thinking is towards a thumbdrive given this medium provides flexibility to restore the image backup easily to other machines (yes you might need Redeploy feature to do this) while if you save it on a microSD, not all "other" machines can read microSD.