USB Drive size for recovery drive?

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I’ve decided to make a recovery drive for my wife’s laptop, and thought I should also make one for my computer too. Never did this when computers were purchased … little procrastination there. At least we’ve done backups.

My tower is a Gateway 64 bit, originally Win 7 Home which I upgraded to Win 10 just before the free upgrade expired. When I ran the recovery drive function it told me I needed a USB drive of at least 8 GB so I picked up a 3-pack of 16 GB drives as would need one for my wife’s computer also. I’m making the recovery drive now in my computer and it’s about halfway done after an hour. Seems to be working fine if just slower than expected.

I tried to run it on my wife’s HP 64-bit that she just got last year which came with Win 10 Home however it said I needed a 32 GB USB drive. Searching this topic on Google tells me I should just need 16 GB although I saw a few posts by others getting the 32 GB message too – didn’t see any answers there.

Anyone know why it would need a 32 GB drive? Not a problem as I’ll pick one up tomorrow, but just curious.

Rod

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All three computers of mine has 32GB sticks with whatever Windows 7 recovery stuff; never did find out why 32GB was called for.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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If you have an image backup and a boot USB you don’t need a recovery USB – I don’t have one.

cheers, Paul

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PaulT, you’re right as rain, however, sometimes all that is needed Windows DVD or USB boot and to run Startup Repair or a few command lines in the DOS prompt. For most other problems — it is best to have a restorable full image of one’s OS partition.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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