
Ask HN: How do you backup/restore/repair your windows machine? - thorin
As I&#x27;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&#x27;m aware that Mac&#x27;s probably have this covered and I can&#x27;t see this being an issue with Linux ( can easily start from usb drive or cd etc ) but I&#x27;m a bit more confused from a home windows user perspective.<p>Most machines I&#x27;ve bought don&#x27;t have a Windows disk, everything is pre-installed. I can&#x27;t create  a recovery disk as I don&#x27;t have a cd&#x2F;dvd burner and therefore I can&#x27;t load from the disk I don&#x27;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.<p>Obviously data will be stored on external locations and probably cloud as well.
======
HelloNurse
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.

------
pmbr
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
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

