Whole Drive Backup – What to Restore and How?

[Radish]

Hi am not a complete computer geek so please bear that in mind for responses.

I got a new laptop and wanted to do some work on as it came with Windows 11 and that is totally new to me.

Using an IFL boot flash drive I made a single image file for the entire content of the boot SSD of the laptop. After that I set to modifying the Win11 setup, made some mistakes in doing so, and now need to go back to the beginning by restoring the entire SSD back to its original condition.

Using IFL the following partitions were imaged, which was the entire visible content of the SSD:

System_DRV 260 MiB EFI System (FAT-32) [01]
Microsoft Reserved Partition 16 MiB Microsoft Reserved [02]
Windows-SSD (i.e. the boot partition containing Win11) 951.65 GiB NTFS [03]
WINRE-DRV 1.95 GiB Windows RE (NTFS) [04]

My questions are:

(1) On doing the restore from the image file is it okay for me to tick to restore the entire drive so that the restore for all partitions is done in one go?

(2) Will IFL automatically make sure it will restore each partition image to the correct partition on the SSD?

(3) Will IFL automatically make sure to give all restored partitions the correct file format for each given partition? In this respect I am particularly concerned that the 'Microsoft reserved partition' is restored correctly as there is no information given by IFL/IFW as to what file format that partition is actually in.

(4) Is there any other information I need to be able to do this restore correctly but that, in computing terms, I am too naïve to ask?

[TeraByte Support]

1 yes, 2 yes, 3 yes, 4 no.

[Radish]

Thank you so much for the response. I did the restore today and it all went fine — excellent software.

I have been using IFW/IFL for years now but on WinXP, Win7 and Win10 systems. For all those setups I always had the operating system installed to a single partition and hence never ran into 'problems' when restoring the boot partition. I now have Win11, pre-installed, and all the 'hidden/system partitions' are just plain confusing to me on what to backup and what to restore. But I'll post separately about that later.

Thanks again for the help. Excellent software. :0)

[Brian K]

I backup and restore those same 4 partitions. As a group. Even if you have other partitions on the drive you can backup/restore those other partitions separately. Or backup/restore the Entire Drive. Your choice.