Windows 10 is the only operating system that I am using currently in my day to day life for getting everything done. From writing this simple article/tutorial or to watch movies or to even do a bit of gaming on my laptop. It would really hurt me if anything were to happen to my Windows machine. To prevent this from happening, I have created a Recovery Disk (since Microsoft does not create a backup image in Windows 10 by itself) and in this article I will tell you how you can create a recovery disk for your Windows 10 Computer.
Before we begin, you will need to grab an external hard drive or a flash drive (also known as pen drives in India) with sufficient capacity to hold your entire Windows 10 installation. This size will differ from installation to installation but if you have a Windows installed from a manufacturer (say HP or Dell or any other company) on your computer, the size will be huge. It will be around 30GB and you will need a 32GB Storage drive to create a recovery disk.
Also, note that once you create a recovery disk on an external drive, all the data on that drive will be erased and then the drive may not be able to store any other data till the Recovery data is on that drive. Keeping all these things in mind, let’s get started with creating a Recovery Disk for your Windows 10 installation.
Create a Recovery Disk
To create a recovery disk for your Windows 10 computer, follow the following steps in order and you will have a recovery disk in no time with you.
- In the start menu, search for “Create a Recovery Drive” and launch the application.
- Allow it to run when asked by Windows 10.
- In the window that comes up, choose “Backup System Files to the recovery drive” option and click Next.
- Now you will have to wait for a few seconds or even up to a minute at times. When done, it will show you the size of USB Drive that you need to connect to the computer. In my case, it was a 32GB drive that was required.
- Find and connect the desired USB Drive to the Computer and Click on Next.
- On the next screen, confirm that you understand all the data on the selected drive will be deleted and click on Create.
- Now just wait for Windows to create the Recovery Disk for you. When it’s done, Windows will let you know and then you can unplug your flash drive.
I hope you never need to use the recovery disk that you just created in the above steps, however, I will say it’s better to be safe than sorry at a later stage. Having a recovery disk is a good idea no matter what. If you faced any problem in creating the recovery disk, get in touch with me via the comments section below and I will be happy to help you.
As you probably know by now lots of people have been unable to create Recovery Drives. I have have a new Dell XPS with factory installed Windows 10 Home edition 64-bit. And get the message part way into the creation processes: “We can’t create the recovery drive. A problem occurred while creating the recovery drive.” Dell posted a process at http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN297924/EN on Sept 2 that offers a slight variation on the standard procedure as you’ve given it: Dell has you format the flash drive (NTFS) before starting the wizard. That didn’t work either. I’ve shut down my anti-virus software and that didn’t help. I tried creating it from Safe Mode, but the process states that it doesn’t not work from Safe Mode. All suggestions appreciated. Thanks in advance