Will Survival Kit creation wipe out my existing backups?
I have a 5GB GPT USB HDD with several months of backup sets on it and am considering creating the Survival Kit on it and would like to know if the process of making it bootable will wipe out those backup sets.


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Personally, I haven't been willing to test it on a drive with critical data. Instead, I would go the route of using disk management (or a third party free tool like minitool partition) and allocated 2GB of free space on the end of the drive as it's own partition.
Then, create a small USB rescue media (flash drive). Take a full disk backup of it. Then restore that backup to the small partition. You now have your very own survival kit and can repeat this SAFELY, anytime you want to upgrade the rescue media version (as updates are released).
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Sounds like good advice. I have successfully created Survival Disk on a 3TB WD 2.5" USB HDD which had data on it. But, in all these things it is better to be safe than sorry.
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Rob, you can skip the step about creating a backup of a USB stick and restoring it - I used to do the same but if you just allocate a drive letter to the 2GB FAT32 partition (for the Survival Kit) on the external HDD, then you can create the rescue media direct to that drive letter.
I have been doing this with my own external drives for the past year or more with no problems. It works great with the MVP Custom ATIPE Builder script - my 2GB FAT32 partition has drive letter N: and I just point the tool at N: whenever I want to update the rescue boot media on the HDD.
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Roger that.
Also, once the bootble partition has been created, you can just replace boot.wim with a newer version of boot.wim
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Have been copying an updated boot.wim to the drive too after adding Powershell support to it!
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Thank you all for your advice. I decided to go ahead into the unknown and install the Survival Kit. In an attempt to be on the safe side I copied the most recent backup from each of my two computers to another disk. Good move because the Survival Kit implementation process did format the backup drive to re-partition it. It warned me that it would and gave me the option to cancel the process. I decided to go ahead with it. I have since copied the most recent backup from my primary computer back to the backup drive and validated it successfully. I am now in the process of doing the same for my other computer.
Probably a better approach would be to use a partition manager tool such as Easeus to created the recovery partition first. I've used their Partition Manager before to partition a disk with data on it and it did so successfully, moving the data as it created the partitions. I am guessing that the Survival Kit then would not format the drive.
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Chris, thanks for the update and glad you have got the survival kit created OK and copying your backups back to the drive. Don't forget to test out booting from the Survival Kit to get yourself familiar with how it works etc.
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