Backup Drive best practice?

[chris]

Evolving story - is my choice below re Restore To, best practice?
How can I avoid the second-drive trap?

I have a Lenovo, came with 7 and I put 10 Pro on it. It has 2x system partitions (Recovery 499MB, EFI 100MB)(& i think a hidden GPT entry), then the C: (Windows) & D: (my data).
It has 0xC000000e error, unbootable & near un-fixable, after being imaged to a backup drive and then running with that drive connected & going to sleep and awaking. I want to restore from the image file that is stored on the "D:" of the backup drive. The image file itself has the 2 partitions & C but not D, or not its contents anyway. (I dont know if it specifies D: size or somesuch). I dont want to touch the D: of the unbootable main drive. Using IFL on a USB stick, I select Restore From and choose the 2 hidden partitions & C:. Then Restore To and I choose to delete the hidden partitions of the main drive and restore to the C:. Is my Restore To choice correct? I dont want to have my C: get smaller due to the hidden partitions taking up some of its space, nor do I want free space before them. And I dont want the D: on the main to be touched.

Well, my guess worked. Was it best practice? It restored & booted OK, in less time than writing this note to here took. the main D is untouched & disk layout looks full from the start.

What is the difference (if any) at Backup From between selecting the entire drive then unticking D and leaving the rest of the partitions selected, versus ticking 3 partitions but not the last one D & not the drive itself?

What a trap that backup USB drive is. This 0xC000000e happened an insomniac night ago & took a long time to sort. Today was fast. Im about to travel and want to carry a spare replacement drive that has the same partitions layout as the main drive, in case the whole drive fails; and that has on its "D backup" partition an image file of the main drive, in case the Windows boot software gets screwed up or some other system software issue occurs; and that lets me keep backing up main D: data to "Backup D" data so I have a Data backup ongoing.

Yet it very much appears I cant afford to leave it connected, even when doing long data backups from main D: to "Backup D", in case I wander off and the pc sleeps or whatever and restarts and confuses the 2 identical active hidden 100MB boot partitions (one on each drive) -or whatever is occuring ..

How can I prevent this foul-up?? Set the backup drive 100MB EFI partition not Active? Easiest way is? Or something else?

thank you so much
Chris

[Brian K]

Chris,

Just need a little more info. Can you open IFW, Backup, Full. What partitions are on HD 0 and HD 1? Their Labels and Sizes. Thanks.

Are both disks GPT? Or is HD 1 MBR?

[chris]

(night here now, have to check in the a.m.)

[chris]

HD0 GPT (in laptop)
1 Recovery 499MiB NTFS
2 EFI system partition 100MiB FAT-32 "active"
3 Microsoft reserved partition 16MiB GPT entry
4 C 77.52GiB NTFS
5 D 219.96GiB NTFS
HD1 GPT (USB backup)
1 Recovery 499MiB NTFS
2 EFI system partition 100MiB FAT-32 "active"
3 Microsoft reserved partition 16MiB GPT entry
4 Backup D 387.63GiB NTFS

[Brian K]

Chris,

I gather you have a drive backup image in "Backup D" partition. When you restored this in IFL you chose to restore the first 4 partitions. There is no need to delete partitions prior to a restore. In the Restore To screen that shows the partitions, just select any one of the 4 partitions and click Next. You will then see that the first 4 partitions will be restored.

Your external HD has partitions that aren't needed. I'd delete the first two partitions.

[joedenly]

It's usually adviced that always keep a backup of your data so that it must be safe there is lots of data container likes of Google drive, docs which can store data online and there is no chances to lose data.