New
#11
This is a reply to both ignatzatsonic and Lady Fitzgerald.
Things are looking clearer. Its Macrium Reflect Free for me now.
You both made it clear that a system image of C: would include my three programs. Good. That's now settled.
Q 1: But does that mean that they will be restored so that they appear to the OS as fully installed as though by their install files and ready to run?
Lady Fitz said "create an image of an external drive, saving the image on a drive in the computer, then delete everything on the external drive and try to restore the image made back to the external drive."
I will do that. It will give me confidence (hopefully) that I have mastered the technique (it seems simple!). Then, I will make a system image of my C: drive, restore it on to an external USB drive and inspect that to see what has arrived.
It should look in Windows Explorer exactly like my C: drive - everything there.
Q 2: True?
Presumably, that drive will not be bootable. I suspect that only the C: drive allows booting unless special steps are taken to make another drive bootable. Therefore, one purpose of making a system image is to have saved the boot area before a crash and then allow everything to be loaded back on to the C: drive for booting and getting back to normal (as at the date of the system image).
Q 3: But can a system image be placed on an external USB HD which is then bootable?
ignatzatsonic said "C is a partition. Not a drive. Images are typically made on a partition by partition basis." and "Therefore, if you in fact make an image of the C partition (who knows?), it will include EVERYTHING on C, Windows, cat pictures, applications, licensing information, minute details of the configuration, etc. Whatever is on C, in its entirety."
Please see a clip of my SSD. It contains two partitions: one, 100 MB in size, (which contains the EFI system which I think is concerned with Input/Output), and the second which is bigger. I have looked at Macrium's instructions and its video and it seems clear that all I have to do to make a system image image is to drag my two partitions on the the target drive which appears in the Macrium window. Then, I could restore that image to my C: drive using Macrium and that C: drive will be bootable, as before.
Q4: True?
By the way, I don't want to roll back from W10. I am happy with 7. (W10 was mentioned because the OP mentioned it.)
Thanks for all the help.