![]() The software recognizes multiple drive partitions, which is one of the main reasons you'd want to image a USB drive yet some of the other tools can't create a single backup file containing two partitions. Our top recommendation goes to imageUSB by PassMark for having the best overall interface (cleanly displays lots of relevant information/options at once) and for simply functioning the best. Other applications for making USB drive backups Although the feature is well displayed, we didn't know it was there until working on this article.Ĭlicking the save icon next to the listed device up top will let you create a VHK backup file of the drive and this image can be restored later by selecting the VHK file instead of an ISO. So if your boot media needs around 4GB of space, use a 4GB flash drive to create the backup image, which can be restored to a larger drive later while maintaining minimal storage requirements.Īs mentioned earlier, Rufus is installed on many machines - over 640,000 downloads on TechSpot alone as of writing - and might be the most convenient option for making backup images of removable drives. If you would prefer to create an image file that's closer to the size of the content on the device instead of the entire drive capacity, try to use the smallest thumbdrive possible for creating the bootable media during the backup process. While creating and restoring USB image files has some conveniences over manually copying the data via File Explorer, note that the backup image will contain a sector-by-sector copy of your entire drive, so the resulting file size will be the entire capacity of the drive, no matter how much data is on the device.įor instance, backup images of Windows 10 and XenialPup 7.5 both occupied 14.9GB on our storage drive and took the same amount of time to restore on the USB drive, despite the former OS containing many gigs of data and the latter having less than half a gigabyte. Tools that can create backup images of USB drives Side note: If you have an ISO of Windows, you can create a portable OS drive with WinToUSB (MS recommends 32GB for To Go drives).A separate recovery drive/classic boot CDs such as Hiren's, or individual tools for partitioning/ cloning drives, password recovery, malware cleanup etc.Windows To Go or another portable OS (a way to browse drives/files and the internet).The full installation media for Windows 10 (or your operating system).USB drives images that might be worth storing While the utilities we'll be covering are especially relevant for backing up bootable USB drives or those with multiple partitions, they can come in handy any time that you would like to clone one USB drive to another or overwrite your drive and easily restore the contents. ![]() The ability to make backup images of bootable USB drives seems particularly useful for testing several portable operating systems, such as 'Windows To Go' or any of the various Linux distros, and we would like to explore pen drive platforms in a future article. We also learned that in the case of a Windows 10 installation USB drive, you can simply copy all of the setup files from the thumb drive to another destination, then copy them back, and still have a bootable installation media. However, while Windows 10 has a fully interfaced feature for making backup images of the operating system, we couldn't find any way to create an image file of a USB drive.Īlthough we were seeking a simple command line or native GUI wizard to create a full image backup of a bootable USB drive, we were happy to discover several lightweight tools that can get the job done, including one that you might already have installed for making boot drives in the first place like Rufus. Having not cloned a bootable USB drive before, the operation seemed like something that could be accomplished from a Command Prompt or elsewhere around Windows. ![]() Intending to save some time and effort on the next go-around, we sought methods to preserve an exact copy of bootable USB drives which could be restored from a backup file when needed. In the case of Windows 10, unless you saved an ISO of the operating system instead of making a USB installation drive with Microsoft's media creation tool, or still have your USB drive configured, you will likely have to redownload the entire OS the next time you need the installation files on a bootable drive. Do you keep a bootable USB drive handy? Maybe you still have the USB drive that you last used to install Windows, or any of the other bootable thumb drives that you've made over the years? Since we only tend to keep a few USB drives available, we tend to overwrite the contents of Windows installation media and the like after a single use.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |