Can I boot AND recover system from a disk backup or do I need to make a bootable media?

Pierosparviero

My PC, runs under Windows 11, installed from an installation media bought at Microsoft. There are 2 hdd. One (known by Diskmanagement as Disk 1) has been given the letter C: It contains only the partitions installed by Windows, one of which is partition C:. Here hare the OS with its satellites, and all the applications that I installed. I am planning to make a backup of this disk. My question is: in case of crash or similar, could I reboot my pc AND reinstall system and applications using this disk? Or should I make also a bootable media, boot the pc using this, then reinstall the system and the rest of the content of this hdd? Thank you for your enlightened advice. (The other hdd, disk 0 for Computermanagement and for me) has only one partition and contains all my data. I back it up regularly and I don't have any question regarding it).

Pierosparviero

Editor changed "D colon" into

aiArtisan

Thank you for your question, Pierospaviero. I understand you are asking if your PC crashed, how could you recover? Aomei has many tools that can help you recover from a crash. You could use the BackUpper (BU) boot tool that goes into the BCD / Windows boot menu, and you could use the BU option in Windows Recovery menu. Aomei WinPE USB is a great tool I have used many times, try it out. It is OK to tell BU to save image on your secondary HDD, however for the most reliable backup, please keep your backup image .ADI on an external disk.

If your secondary disk is used only for data, you could consider formatting it in ExFat, instead of NTFS. Both are good filesystems, but ExFat is simpler, and has slightly more performance. Formatting a filesystem will erase all data, copy your data somewhere else first, then return the data after reformating.

Aomei Recovery Environment integration
https://www.ubackup.com/help/create-windows-recovery-environment.html

Aomei WinPE Builder 2.0 USB, includes: Partition Assistant, Backupper, Recuva, OSF Mount, CPU-Z, Bootice. Does not support any additional drivers, such as some internal NVMe disks.
https://www.ubackup.com/pe-builder.html

Backupper WinPE USB:
Add custom drivers, such as NVMe, if necessary. Does not work with some monitors.
https://www.ubackup.com/help/create-bootable-disk.html

admin

@Pierosparviero, You need to create a WinPE bootable media of AOMEI Backupper. When your system can't boot, you can boot the computer from WinPE media to restore the disk backup. It will restore the original system, applications and data.