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Full Backup or image

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If I have a rescue media and a full backup, is that enough to restore to a new hard drive in the event of a crash? Or, do I need a system image backup?

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fthorns, welcome to these User Forums.

Simple answer = yes.  A full backup and working rescue media should be all that is needed to recover to a new hard drive on the same computer as where the backup was created.

This assumes that by a full backup you mean a Disk & Partitions backup of the drive that includes all hidden and system partitions.

Note: when recovering an OS drive using rescue media, the rescue media should be booted in the same BIOS mode as was used by the OS to boot.  You can see what this BIOS mode should be by running the msinfo32 program and looking at the BIOS mode setting.  This is important as if you have a Legacy / MBR system and boot the rescue media in UEFI mode, the drive will be migrated from MBR to GPT as required by UEFI.

You should test booting from the rescue media well before any recovery is needed, and check that you can see your internal and external drives that would be used for recovery.