Ask HN: How do you backup/restore/repair your windows machine?

1 points by thorin 8y ago ↗ HN

As I'm now self employed rather than relying on the enterprise I feel the need to have a decent backup and recovery strategy for my business machines. I'm aware that Mac's probably have this covered and I can't see this being an issue with Linux ( can easily start from usb drive or cd etc ) but I'm a bit more confused from a home windows user perspective.

Most machines I've bought don't have a Windows disk, everything is pre-installed. I can't create a recovery disk as I don't have a cd/dvd burner and therefore I can't load from the disk I don't have ;-) Assuming I can at least get to the bios menu I suppose there is a recovery option and I can repair using a disk image which I can store on an external hard drive or usb. Am I thinking along the correct lines.

Obviously data will be stored on external locations and probably cloud as well.

3 comments

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pmbr 8y ago ↗

Most machines with Windows pre-installed also come with a separate Microsoft Reserved Partition and/or a recovery partition.

Of course I always keep a printed copy of the register, just in case!!!

thorin 8y ago ↗

I've forgotten about the reserved partition and you've reminded me of when this was last a problem for me. I had a multi-boot set up with GRUB and managed to make the reserved partition unusable somehow and never managed to recover it. This meant I could work with Linux but not recover Windows

HelloNurse 8y ago ↗

You need to plan for losing your main partition and any other partition on the same device, i.e. you cannot rely on recovery partitions.

I suggest a combination of booting suitable disk imaging tools from a USB pen drive (both for creation and restoration of your disk images) and storing disk images on a large external USB drive or on a network server, so that the former is small, disposable and practically read-only and the latter doesn't need to be bootable.