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Basic questions on Backup and Restore in Windows 8.1

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Windows 8.1, 1 hard drive, partitions are unnamed partition, WinRE partition, Drive C, Drive D recovery partitions. The above came stock on the laptop hard drive. Full backups.

1. Backup
Obviously in the above partition configuration I would backup to an external hard drive.

a. I backup logical WinRE, UnNamed and Drive D partitions separately to the hard drive. I only have done this once and assume these partitions will not change.
Correct/Incorrect?

b. When I backup C partition, Acronis informs me that I should also backup Winre as well.
Is there a reason for this?

2. Restore
I would think it is best to boot and restore with the USB and external hard drive.
a. If I restore all of C, do I need to also restore WinRe?

3. I used to have another laptop that had a logical partition of E that I created on the same hard drive . I would backup C drive to E (full image). I had an issue once on a restore and thought that perhaps trying to use Acronis program installed on Drive C to restore Drive C from Drive E was not a good idea.- as opposed to the external hard drive. Thoughts?

Thank you very much
Peter

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In 1b the application is probably letting you know that the boot files are located on the WinRE partition and should be included when backing up the OS C partition.

In 2 then the answer would be yes.

In 3 your suspicion of issue with recovery from 1 partition to another on same disk are sound.

In 1a it is not safe to assume that these partitions would not change. The Recovery partition will most certainly change over time and there is also the issue of metadata changes made by Windows itself with respect to the data on those partitions to consider.

The safest bet is to perform full disk backups on a regular basis. Keeping more than 1 full disk backup is also recommended. Many users create a full disk backup of a new installation for example and keep that backup separate and apart from other backups so that going back to a clean install is possible.

Thank you, fantastic information to clarify my perspective.

Backing up recovery drive and winre and unnamed partition:
Not sure why recovery partition would change that came with the machine and considering you can (and I did) buy those tools on that partition separately (bootable USB)--UNLESS you are stating updates to the machine via HP might change this..

I would worry about restoring the Winre and unnamed partition as that might make the originally bootable hard disk not possibly bootable.
I say this since if you clone a hard drive (I did thank God) you must place (as you know) the new hard drive in the machine and the original hard drive as a USB drive and clone from external to internal..

Any further comments?

Thanks
Peter