Macrium Installation

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motim said:

Hello Forum,
Finally installed Macrium (off line), installation was smooth, made the bootable disk,After disk burning, I clicked on " add recovery boot menu option" and now have some questions:
1. How to test the disk if it works (stupid question?)

You need to see if it can boot your PC, which is what you'd have to do if your hard drive failed. If it won't, you're can't restore.

Two ways:

1: go into your BIOS and locate the setting for boot device order or similar wording. It's probably now set to boot from hard drive first. You'd need to change that to CD drive first.

or

2: When booting normally, hit a particular key on your keyboard that will bring up a boot device menu for that particular boot only. Choose your CD drive from that menu.

The second choice is the easiest. The keystroke you need varies from PC to PC. It's probably one of the F keys---F8, F12, etc. You can experiment or look at your manual or Google for your PC or motherboard brand.

2. I was asked to register with Macrium (give name and email) shell I ?

I can't recall being asked to do that, but I use the free version. I'd guess you are using the paid version? I doubt it's mandatory. Might lead to some spam you may not want?

3. To make the first backup (only system and prog. files which are on "C"), I want to locate it on "G" disk, (there is also the Windows done backup image which after making backup with Macrium I intend to delete) - make image or clone ?

Image---if you are trying to protect yourself against a disaster with a proper "backup".

Clone--if things are going fine and you simply want to move your Windows installation to another drive.

I assume you should image--that's the most common use of Macrium.

You may need to image more than just C. What partitions are marked as "system" in Windows Disk Management on your PC? That might be C and might be another partition. If so, you need to image both. You can make separate image files of each or you can make one image file containing both.

4. Something else, have many restore points, (attached screenshot list), I want to clear some, but in "System restore Explorer" or "Ccleaner" only current year shown, as you can see there is even a 2014 image
which does not exist, and they all consume space.
I will attach here screenshots of Macrium and list of restore points I want to clear some.

See pic below.

In CCleaner, you can choose individual System Restore points and delete them, one by one. Pic below is my CCleaner. The blue restore point would be deleted if I hit the "remove" button shown.

You can also delete ALL restore points from within System Restore's configuration settings in Windows.

1. Try it on a small test partition
2. No - I never do
3. Image
4. Do those restore points actually still exist or are those dummy entrie

Hi,
After creating a full image go to the restore section and use the verify image icon.
I would also make a usb flash winpe recovery too just incase the cd gets damaged

5. Finally, how can I collect all your answers to save them in a folder on my computer ?

Right click here on this thread and then "save as".

Disk Cleanup has no effect on backups made by Windows Backup as far as I know.

If CCleaner can find only certain restore points, I'd assume that's all there are. Normally, they should all appear as choices for a possible restore when you use System Restore. It would be very unusual to have restore points from 2014 unless you have it set to use a ridiculously high amount of hard drive space. In my experience, I normally have 5 to 10 restore points per month and at any given moment have perhaps 10 or 12. I allow about 7 GB of hard drive space.

Have you confirmed that you do NOT need to restore any partitions other than C?

There's nothing at all wrong with keeping your Windows backups if you have enough disk space. Some people use 2 methods such as Macrium and Aomei, in an alternating fashion. What's far more important is that you fully understand the methods you do use, to their conclusion. The best way to do that is to do a restore, now, when the heat is off.

Stick needs to be ntfs as well so reformat it
No you need to redo the winpe to the stick = it doesn't take that long
This is why you need to redo the winpe to the usb flash drive Macrium will make it bootable
Then using F8 when the device is connected it will show up
But you must test it after creating it
You might need to go to setup and disable fast or quick startup.