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What size USB disk do I need to create the bootable image?

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Hi, I have looked all over the place for a simple answer. I have a simple configuration. C:win10 d:Recovery partition. All I want to do is backup and be able to restore the system image but I have to create the bootable media first.

1) So what size USB sticks do I need?

2) Also, with Acronis do I need to create a boot disk for each PC or is the Acronis boot disk portable across multiple windows platforms? I have one PC running win10 and 2 others running win7.

thanks for your help.

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2Gb is more than plenty.  Drives are so cheap, you're better off getting an 8gb or 16gb usb 3.0 drive if you don't have one lying around. If your system has usb 3.0 ports, you want a usb 3.0 flash drive to keep things as speedy as possible.  

No, you don't need multiple versions of the recovery media.  One version should work on all (most) systems.  If for some reason the default recovery media (linux based) can't find your internal disk or NIC, then you can create WinPE version instead and add Windows drivers for better support.  So far though, the latest version of Acronis 2016 (v6571) recovery media works on every system I've used it on.

The key is making sure your bios is properly congigured though and that you boot the media in the same way as the OS was installed.  Reference this thread and screenshots for some more info on that part.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/121829#comment-378318

Bobbo, thanks. I finally figured it out when I went to create the media it was just over 512 mb. I had a bunch of 2G USBs laying around (from my embroidery machine) and didn't want to have to buy more it not needed. I will have to read more on WINPE and such because I don't want to have the same issue of not being able to restore my system Image as how I got to this place. Makes me wonder why WIN 7 needs 16GB or that's what 'they' say. I haven't looked at the file size - I couldn't get any of the image files to lay down, after about a week of research and trying this and that why I went to Acronis. Thanks again. Dallas

Roger that.  Just test the boot media and make sure you can select your main hard drive and create an image somewhere.  The start recovery (but don't recover) and make sure you can see the backup file and that you can still see the primary hard drive.  If you can do those things, you'll be in good shape when a realworld scenario comes up.  

I believe the Windows recovery is basically the full blown Windows installer and includes 32 and 64bit so it's quite a bit bigger.  In Windows 10, you can create such an installer/repair USB using the Windows media creation tool which comes in at just below 7Gb.  The Acronis recovery media is much lighter though.