Back Up cannot find external hard drive

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to do a complete back up of my computer on an external drive using Backup on Windows 10.

I've tried 5 different external drives and so far only one (an SSD drive) can be found while the other 4 (not SSD) are not found.

I don't know if the fact that the only drive that Backup manages to find is an SSD drive has any relevance.

It's not a space issue, those drives all have a capacity above 2TB, well above what I need.

Answer 1

Thanks for your help but after doing all that you describe, it still doesn't work for me.

I really need to find something easier to use.

Thanks anyway.

Answer 2

That function is called Reflect Recovery which you can add to the boot menu.

You would see an option every time when you boot to either select Recovery or run Windows.

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7...

By default, the screen shows for 30 seconds, but you can decrease the timer. I have set it to 3 seconds.

Disclaimer:

The link included is a non-Microsoft website that would provide accurate and safe information. Watch out for ads on the site which are frequently classified as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Products). There is no need to buy paid products to fix your computers as they do more harm than good sometimes.

Answer 3

So what you are saying essentially is that even though Reflect does not allow me to use the "create bootable rescue media" function, I can still use .mrimg file to boot my computer in case of a crash?

Is there any way I can check whether the back-up I created works as a bootable clone by restarting Windows using that clone?

Typically on a mac, when restarting the computer there's a certain set of keys that you can press to have the option of restarting using a USB drive. I can't find anyway of doing that on Windows after googling it.

Answer 4

>>I've tried those two options, they create a single file with the same extension, so I can't see the difference between the two.

Yes, the extension is .mrimg. Let me explain to you by an example.

Suppose your PC has two partitions, C and D on a single disk.

The first option backs up both C and D to a compressed file called mrimg. If you want a file from the backup later, double click the file that would mount the backup as a separate drive in Explorer.

The second option only backs up the C drive, so if your computer stops working, you can restore the computer within minutes using a USB drive. You can mount this too in Explorer.

Answer 5

Thanks a lot for your patience.

My drives are formatted in NTFS for Windows.

For the time being I'm not using anything because the drives are not found in Backup.

Reflect gives me the following three options in terms of creating a back up:

1. Image selected disks on this computer.
2. Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows.

I've tried those two options, they create a single file with the same extension, so I can't see the difference between the two. Also, since Reflect does not work with GPT format (not sure what that means and whether that's something I can change), those two options are not terribly helpful if I can't do anything with that backup afterwards. (The files contained within the backup file don't even seem to be accessible).

So I tried option 3:

Create a File and Folder backup

But that crashed towards the end of the procedure.