@hdmi Thanks again for sharing. Your info is really accelerating my learning curve.
I have a relatively simple consumer desktop to support a laptop. My work programs aren't terribly compute-intensive, but they do interact with relatively large files, as compared to documents and spreadsheets. When I got the new Lenovo, I bought a (probably overkill) CalDigit TS4 docking station - it's Thunderbolt on both the connection to the PC and on the downstream USB-C ports. I'm hoping that getting a portable SSD to connect through it for my offsite backups will be pretty quick. If the notes I see on Macrium prove correct, my image should be maybe 200 GB at the rule of thumb of 60% of occupied disk space.
I sure wish I could just automate the imaging process and not have to remember or follow a calendar reminder. That would, of course, not be consistent with a stand-alone boot to image. That idea, though, probably didn't get completely thought out. Since I'm going to have to retrieve the off-site drive (wherever I choose to keep it) and plug it in, I've already un-automated the process. In years gone by, I'd still have to remember to do it. Now, my life is driven by Google Calendar anyway, so it should work fine (from a people-failing point of view).
I only make an image of my C: partition a few times per year TBH, as the only real purpose of an image is just to be able to rescue my installation of Windows, updates, drivers, software and settings (at least for me). It's so I don't have to reinstall everything from scratch in the possible event that doing an in-place upgrade to repair Windows doesn't help, but TBH that has never happened to me. lol Or if the SSD breaks. The only thing that matters to me in this regard is the simple fact that I need that image to be as strictly reliable as possible WITHOUT all the unnecessary hassle that this would take with Macrium Reflect. Whether or not I may need to apply a few reasonably fast updates again after doing an image restore, doesn't make a shred of difference to me. Heck, updating Windows 11 from 21H2 to 22H2 alone took a lot longer than it will take to restore my image
AND install all the updates from the last four months again. Some of my settings may have also changed since four months ago, but I can still always get them back in next to no time. Important personal files I just copy to external storage with FastCopy. So I never create any image files that contain personal files. Ever. With the method that I use to create an image, excluding personal files from image is easier, faster, less tedious compared to relocating them to a separate data partition and making always perfectly sure that none of them can still nevertheless end up being on the C: partition (for whatever the reason might be). There can be plenty of reasons why relocation of all your personal files may not always be feasible or practical, and, with Macrium Reflect, the only way that you can specify exclusions of files/folders is through editing the Windows registry so, good luck with that after your Windows installation may have already been shot to pieces when you weren't looking. Or you were looking, but you were looking with your eyes shut.
If there's some settings for which there exists no easy way (that I am aware of) to redo them, I just use the free edition of Microsoft
Power Automate Desktop (PAD) to record the necessary flow(s) that navigate(s) to them, and record (an)other flow(s) that change(s) them. Editing the flows after recording them is child's play. You can just press Ctrl + A (to Select All) in the editor window before copying the contents (actions) of the flow to clipboard. Next, you can
paste it to notepad. After you edited the actions with notepad, you can just copy/paste them back to the editor window in PAD. Learning to use PAD for all kinds of things like
UI automation is something that requires no real programming skills. Making some screenshots to be able to remember and compare various settings usually helps also. So does adding (partial) screenshots to your flows in PAD, as you can also make flows that create them and/or that use them in multiple different ways (also including OCR actions). That said, constantly allowing settings to be changed dynamically on-the-fly is key to my usual workflow. I hope this further explains why I didn't walk that extra mile of building a custom WinPE based Rescue Media bootable ISO file of Acronis that could be booted straight into. That is, via an automated boot sequence that uses rEFInd with a custom bootloader so it chainloads iPXE which uses a custom script, a script that mounts an iSCSI volume where Ventoy is installed so Ventoy's own limitation of it requiring a USB device to be installed on is effectively bypassed through this so, next, the custom script in iPXE can grab the aforementioned bootable ISO file over the LAN or WAN, after which it can force Ventoy to boot straight into your file. Finally, simply replacing the file on the remote storage gives you total control over the boot process through Wake-On-LAN (WOL). Sure, it's a little bit nerdy, I'll admit. But it's also not rocket science, just too much hard work if all you need is to boot just one or two computers automatically, like, three, maybe four times a year. Seriously, though.. my head hurts each time when someone tries to tell me I should consider making an automatic image of my C: partition via a weekly schedule. I mean, what in the name of some kind of spiritual entity above the sky should I do THAT for? lol
