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Create new Windows 8.1 Installation Image Using External USB drive and a Bootable DVD

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I just bought a new PC which originally came with Windows 7. I have just installed Windows 8.1 and all of the updates as well as my programs. I would like to create a "factory" image at this point so I can re-install Windows in the future to this point if need be. Few questions:

1. Would this be considered a disk and partition backup?
2. Should I backup the other "extra" partitions that Windows creates automatically in addition to the system partition?
3. Ideally I would like to make the backup to my external 2TB hard drive instead of DVDs. However, I do not want to make this boot-able as I have other data on here and don't want to tie up a whole 2TB drive for one image. Therefore, can I do this and then just create an Acronis rescue DVD that I can boot to then use the external USB drive image to restore?

Thanks in advance for any help.

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1- Yes.
2- Yes. Include ALL partitions of your system disk. Even better, as you select the partitions to backup, click on the blue "switch to disk mode" to select the entire disk.
3- This is even recommended.

Make sure you boot your computer on the recovery CD and that you verify you can recover a couple of files (not a whole partition!) just to make sure everything works.