One of the good things that occurred during my Xfinity-imposed offline status was taking care of some maintenance chores that I needed to get done. Without the distraction of internet access, I turned my time to cleaning up my to-do list.
Foremost on the list was getting caught up with my full-drive image set. I have a couple that were fairly recent, but not a complete set all the same age. I ran my extended Disk Cleanup, then launched Image for Windows and created a full-drive image for each of the four drives on my daily driver desktop (there are actually five, but the fifth is a 2TB single partition for my drive images).
My 2TB drive would not be able to hold the full set, so as one was completed and I launched the next, I ran a Robocopy script to copy the completed drive image to a 3TB HDD plugged into the drive dock on my NAS. Once that copy was complete, I deleted the image from the 2TB drive, freeing up that space. The plan was to get all images on that 3TB HDD, then unplug it and store it away for safe-keeping.
It took a couple of hours all together; those four drives hold 748.9 GB of files/data, and I was running everything single file rather than via Task Scheduler. But I did get it all done, copied to the 3TB HDD, and have it stored. When I lose any of those drives in the future (I say “when”, not “if”, because it’s always “when”) I can replace the bad drive with a new one of like kind, retrieve and plug in that 3TB HDD, restore that drive’s complete image with its partitions in the right places and the correct sizes, then use my latest partition/logical drive images to update any pertinent partition.
I’ve used this procedure a few times in the past for dodgy HDD’s, and it saves a lot of time and effort as far as getting back up and running normally.
Should I accept almost all choices as Default. For example, if IfW has choice X or choice Default, I am thinking now simply to accept what is already clicked. Now, are there any choice clicks that would be different?
