System Image Backup to USB Drive

[mejifair]

Hi all,

I recently purchased a Lenovo 900 ultrabook, and proceeded to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro (using a Windows 7 Ultimate product key). Now that I have done this the factory "restore" does not include my upgrade and I am concerned that I would lose it if I ever needed to restore.

So, I am trying to do a full system image backup to a flash drive, but Windows 10 says that the drive is not allowed for this. I can create the USB drive as a network share and get the backup to work using that method, but I don't really trust that it will work properly.

Has anyone been able to figure out how to do a full system image backup to a USB drive in Windows 10 that you trust will work in the case a restore is needed?

 

[realwarder]

A factory restore will always go back to Windows 7, but if you install Windows 10 on this PC using an ISO or upgrade, logging into your Microsoft Account (MSA) will unlock the Windows 10 license.

If you can mount the USB drive as a network drive, won't that work as a system image restore point too in future? And since the imaging tool is a Windows 7 one even in 10, you probably won't even need to move to Windows 10 to restore but can do an image restore from 7.

I've always used File History to backup files daily... System image to clone hard drives. It's worked fine for that (in 7 only). Also the sysinternals tool disk2vhd which will write to USB. But I use that for moving old drives onto clean PC installs [not for backup/restore purposes.] I've always been of the opinion that if a drive fails, it's a great time for a clean install providing I have my data.

 

[mejifair]

Thanks for the information.

My question though is really how to do a full bootable image restore to a USB drive in Windows 10 Pro. I don't plan on updating the image, and I never had Windows 7 on this device. It is a brand new ultrabook with Windows 10 Home installed from the factory. The Lenovo image recovery partition I am sure contains Windows 10 Home, so I want to be sure that I can get back to the "initial" Windows 10 Pro state on my laptop should anything ever go wrong (i.e. - let's say I want to enable the Insider program and things go awry...I want to get back to the original Windows 10 Pro state).

I was able to back up as system image, but it does not appears to be bootable. So that is the reason for my initial question;

Is there a way to create a fully bootable restore image for my Windows 10 Pro laptop that can be written to a USB drive?