struggling with the old stuff still on this laptop

Your C partition is about 230 gb and it has about 120 gb occupied.

I would expect an image of that to take up about half of the occupied space--somewhere near 60 gb.

So, it's entirely possible that your 64 gB flash drive is too small. At best, it would hold only one image.

Imaging is typically on a partition by partition basis--all or none of each chosen partition. I don't think you can tell Macrium to exclude certain items on C from your image of C. It's all of C or nothing.

You can use a higher compression level from the Macrium menus and that would probably allow you to put 1 image file on a 64 gb flash drive--but only one. You might do that as a test just to get some experience with Macrium.

You need to be ABSOLUTELY positive that the Macrium recovery disk you made WILL boot your PC. If it can't, you are dead in the water if your hard drive fails.

So--you should plan on a larger flash drive or much better an external hard drive of much larger size--say 1 TB. That would hold a dozen or more images if you needed to keep that many.

On a mid-powered PC, I would expect Macrium to take perhaps 15 minutes to save an image file of that size to an internal hard drive.

It would take considerably longer to save the image file to a flash drive or external drive, which might mean USB 2.0 or USB 3.0--both slower than an internal hard drive.

David, in theory a flash stick is an ideal medium for any sort of back-up system, you only have to compare an install from a Stick compared with a DVD to see the difference in pure speed . Unfortunately technical issues do temper the usability, the USB connection is not the fastest, although USB3 is changing that, but the main issue is the size, I have a few USB3 capable 64GB but am waiting for the price of 128GB or even 256GB to fall before I will consider them for anything other than small scale temporary backups. I currently use a 4TB portable drive via USB3 for my backups, but I doubt that a Stick version of that is anywhere near A 256GB SSD on USB3 may be a thing to consider although cost may be a limiting factor

The USB3 runs at 5GB/s where as SATA II is only 3GB/s so unless we are talking SATA III, depending on other factors USB could be faster than SATA, it is on my external caddy I have SATA II e-SATA or USB3 and USB3 is the way to go

Cripes I completely missed the disk management screen shot

What might work is right clicking the the C Drive and click on Shrink
Just use what ever shrink windows suggests
See what it comes up with Macrium might not be able to deal with the ending sector as it is using the entire disk :/
Reflect compression should be have the actual space of the data on the disk

Another flaw might be on one of the windows where it gives the options to do Differential backup I would usually Uncheck that.

One thing that is clear is there is no system restore partition from the manufacture so we would be Clean install bound.

Thanks all :) for your help and concern.

I have a Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive 2 TB Toshiba 2TB Canvio USB 3.0 external hard drive review | TechRadar

I have used that to make a back-up of the Dell (luckily) and to put my stuff on this HP.
I think I did it twice to be sure.

Now I could use that for the imaging but I don't , as jet, want to take the "old" Dell back up away.

How can I find out how much space is left and make use Macrium reflect does not clean all away before starting ?

Thanks for your help and time,
much appreciated,
Thelma

Hi,
Connect it and show another disk management screen shot.

When the drive is plugged into the laptop, it should appear in My computer, right click and select properties it will show the total space, (a 2TB drive will show less that 2TB even if empty due to the way overheads are excluded by salesman), and the used space.

I set my view of "My Computer" to Tiled which shows this information without needing to do anything



Check the Backup drive which is attached via USB :)

thelma said:

make use Macrium reflect does not clean all away before starting ?

What?

Macrium does not clean anything. It just makes a file that it can later restore. The file will have an mrimg extension, such as AE33B3993333-00-00.mrimg. It will be somewhere near 60 gb in size in your case. You can put it anywhere it will fit other than on C. You can move it around anywhere you want, just as if it were a picture of your cat.

That mrimg file is largely useless UNTIL AND UNLESS it is restored.

When you restore, you choose a destination to restore to. If anything is already on that destination partition or drive, it will be replaced by the restored image. But there is no cleaning or wiping during the earlier procedure of making that mrimg image file---which is where you are now.

You should familiarize yourself with the restoration process so that you are not nervous or unsure how to restore if and when you get in a bad situation (hard drive failure, serious Windows corruption) and must rely on Macrium.

Does your Macrium recovery disk boot your PC? You can find out in 60 seconds, harmlessly.

Hello :), and thank you for all your time and thinking :).

I am really seriously going to use all your help and suggestions.

At the moment I am very occupied in my job as ski school teacher and completely knacked when I get home.

It's still high season here with Easter weekend. I will come back to this thread as soon as I can.

HAPPY EASTER to al of you:)

Ski instructor or is it cold
Happy belated Easter