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Hello there,

I am in the process of transferring my documents HDD to a larger and more reliable enterprise drive. I am also transferring my Windows HDD to a SSD.

Whilst looking in Disk Management in Windows 10 I noticed the following:



I imagine that I cannot get rid of the partition which it says is primary active, but presume I am fine to get rid of the recovery partition?

I have a backup strategy which does not require that and the only reason I have not removed it is because I wanted to check whether this would cause problems with the OS which is running nicely.

It should be safe to leave that out. Since you're imaging the original drive over there's zero risk regardless; if the cloned system misbehaves without the recovery partition you can just re-image from the original drive again.

Thank you for your help.

I am using AOMEI Backupper. Can anyone help me decide please whether I should use Incremental Backup or Differential Backup?

http://www.backup-utility.com/features/ ... ackup.html

I think I need to use Incremental? Don't really understand the difference.

Is there a way to get rid of that 102MB Primary/Active partition? Is that extra partition automatically created when W10 is installed? My W10 system does not have that partition maybe because the W10 was upgrade installed.

churin wrote:

Is there a way to get rid of that 102MB Primary/Active partition? Is that extra partition automatically created when W10 is installed? My W10 system does not have that partition maybe because the W10 was upgrade installed.

That's your uEFI partition. If you get rid of it you will not boot.

Deanjo wrote:

churin wrote:

Is there a way to get rid of that 102MB Primary/Active partition? Is that extra partition automatically created when W10 is installed? My W10 system does not have that partition maybe because the W10 was upgrade installed.

That's your uEFI partition. If you get rid of it you will not boot.

So I gather that if the partition is uEFI that extra partition must be there, or the system partition and the boot partition must be separated. Is it realy not possible to put together the system and the boot partitions as for BIOS?

Deanjo wrote:

churin wrote:

Is there a way to get rid of that 102MB Primary/Active partition? Is that extra partition automatically created when W10 is installed? My W10 system does not have that partition maybe because the W10 was upgrade installed.

That's your uEFI partition. If you get rid of it you will not boot.

I don't think it's UEFI - Disk Management usually says if it is, and it doesn't. That's the boot-manager volume and it ought to be kept.

churin wrote:

Deanjo wrote:

churin wrote:

Is there a way to get rid of that 102MB Primary/Active partition? Is that extra partition automatically created when W10 is installed? My W10 system does not have that partition maybe because the W10 was upgrade installed.

That's your uEFI partition. If you get rid of it you will not boot.

So I gather that if the partition is uEFI that extra partition must be there, or the system partition and the boot partition must be separated. Is it realy not possible to put together the system and the boot partitions together as for BIOS?

that 102 MB is a pittance to keep- it also is used for Windows diagnostic functions if Windows Repair is required to recover the OS. I suggest leaving it. Removing it can be a pain and recovering partitions without it can require some non-standard actions (bootrec, etc.) to make the (OS) drive bootable again. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/927392 for some of the details, not for those shy of using the commandline from the Windows Repair functions.

Sheepdisease wrote:

Thank you for your help.

I am using AOMEI Backupper. Can anyone help me decide please whether I should use Incremental Backup or Differential Backup?

http://www.backup-utility.com/features/ ... ackup.html

I think I need to use Incremental? Don't really understand the difference.

Back to the question please.

Sheepdisease wrote:

Sheepdisease wrote:

Thank you for your help.

I am using AOMEI Backupper. Can anyone help me decide please whether I should use Incremental Backup or Differential Backup?

http://www.backup-utility.com/features/ ... ackup.html

I think I need to use Incremental? Don't really understand the difference.

Back to the question please.

You need to do a full backup. Though since you probably don't already have a full backup either and incremental or differential should create a full backup for you anyway since they both need at least one full backup to work.

With AOMEI Backupper when you choose either incremental or differential it does a full backup first and subsequently it will do either an incremental or differential backup (I have opted for 3 phase).

See http://www.backup-utility.com/features/ ... ackup.html for more info.

I can't decide which backup scheme is best, I can't really get my head around the differences.

Are you trying to clone over to a new drive or create a backup image file for restoring at a later time if needed? If you're simply cloning your existing HDD over to and SSD you don't need to be concerned over incremental or differential. Those terms apply to when you're making multiple backup images.

TO answer your question (although not relevant to your current situation from what I can tell) you will always start a backup set with a Full backup image. In differential backup, the 2nd image is the changes since the first full, the 3rd image is the changes since the first full backup, etc. To restore a differential backup you need the full image and whatever more recent image you want to restore from - for example if you want to restore the 3rd backup you made, you'll need the first full image and the third image to restore.
Incremental starts with a full image, but then each subsequent backup builds off the last. So first full, second is any changes since first, third is only changes since second, fourth changes since third, etc. The advantage is that the subsequent images are smaller/faster to create, but restoration requires all the backups between the full and the one you want to restore.

In your case image the first two partitions on your drive to the new SSD - it looks like you're going to need at least a 250GB+ SSD to fit it without shrinking the partitions. If you aren't able to make it happen with AOMEI Backupper, which I have no experience with, I highly recommend Macrium Reflect which has a free edition that will do what you are looking to accomplish.

Thank you for your reply.

This is my set-up:



The drives highlighted are either full HDD or partitions which I am keeping. The other HDDs you see listed are USB removable or going to be taken out of the system.

I have so far done the following:

Drive C is the Windows OS / 250GB SSD
Drive D is my Documents / First 2TB HDD (1.58TB out of 2.0TB)
Drive Z is a backup of the SSD drive / First 2TB HDD (235GB out of 2.0TB)
Drive Y is my main backup drive / Second 2TB HDD



I have scheduled a weekly Windows backup to Z
I have scheduled a monthly Windows backup to Y (still undecided on incremental or differential)
I have scheduled a weekly documents backup to Y (still undecided on incremental or differential)

Each backup will contain a drive/partition image