If you go for that route though, at the start of your computer you'll see something like this: to a point, because if you can't really get to the boot menu (now that Windows prefetches stuff first before showing the boot menu like in Windows 7 times) you're out of luck. To create one, head over to the 'Other Tasks' menu and choose 'Create Rescue Media.':Īnd you will see a number of options, one of which is adding it to the Windows Boot Menu, which can be useful. For example, you can have a USB stick you could use to restore any of the previous backups you had done and bring things back to a sane state.

There's something called recovery media, it's good to have one around in case you get to a point where the machine stops booting. You can already see the cloning and imaging (read: backing up) of the disk right there as buttons below each of the disks you have in the machine, but, I'd like to cover something first. Showing you the disks you have connected to your machine and you'll be in the Backup tab by default. Select the options you want (just plain Reflect is good enough and click the Download button, the installation itself is pretty much the typical Next -> Next -> Next Windows is famous for, but since there's a license agreement in there I ought to tell you to read itĪnyway, once you open the program you'll be greeted with a window like this one: From those Acronis' rebrands that are generally available with new hardware to free open source behemoths like Clonezilla.įirst you need to acquire the program so head off to their site and you'll get a downloader that looks like this when run: I'll show you one way of doing it, with the free version of Macrium Reflect, but there are plenty more. So, here we go, you've got a new external drive you'd like to use to make backups of your current machine, or maybe you bought a new SSD to replace the HDD or add to your current setup and just don't know how. Installation of Macrium and creation of a recovery media.Recent tweaks to the forum software also made it impossible to write the whole guide in a single post, there are character limits now! Which works for our advantage as well because I'll be splitting the guide in different posts and linking to them here in the starting point: I was unsure about where to post the thread, no category seemed appropriate so I'll guess this one will have to do. There is plenty of information on the topic already, but I thought a thread in here wouldn't hurt so here we go.

Macrium reflect clone disk to partition