Hey John,Personal preference. If you have USB 3 available then it doesn't take as long to install windows since it transfers so much faster especially if you are using an SSD as boot drive. On some systems you have to disable secure boot in bios to boot to anything other then the hdd. Lately I have been using the USB since I've been building machines with SSD's in them. But I still do the CD/DVD ISO depending on what I need, especially if its for like hdd diagnostic software or Hirens boot cd.
Hey John!All depends on boot order set in bios. And if windows 10 is corrupted, it's not gonna look at the cd drive next. Thats just not the way it works. The hard drive would have to be totally shot and unrecognizable in order for it to boot to the cd drive next.
There is no benefit in using an DVD instead of an iso. A DVD is also much slower to install windows. Microsoft releases new versions of windows every 6months so you would need to download and create either a new iso/DVD or make a new bootable USB if you wanted to install the latest version. Given the benefits of speed, the cheapness of USB sticks, you may as well use a USB, if necessary you could then wipe it and use it for other purposes until you need it again.What is the difference and/or benefit of creating a CD/DVD (ISO FILE) instead of a USB boot media for Windows 10?
Not really sure what you are trying to achieve, initially you are asking about the different types of bootable media, then you go on to talk about making a "mirror image" of the C drive.
What you are suggesting would work, but your mirror image backups (cloning) are only useful if you keep them up to date, so a cloning is of limited value here. Your better bet would be dedicated backup software to an external drive with one full and incremental backups every day, so that all your work is up to date in the event of disaster failure. In this situation the backup software would have a provision to create a bootable USB/CD to start the recovery process.
You can use the ISO again in the future, if you just choose the USB option then you'd have to manually extract and clone it, whereas you could just use another tool to make another USB stick like etcher or burn onto DVD if you already had the iso image handy.
Boot order depends entirely how you have it defined in BIOS/UEFI.
There is no benefit in using an DVD instead of an iso. A DVD is also much slower to install windows. Microsoft releases new versions of windows every 6months so you would need to download and create either a new iso/DVD or make a new bootable USB if you wanted to install the latest version. Given the benefits of speed, the cheapness of USB sticks, you may as well use a USB, if necessary you could then wipe it and use it for other purposes until you need it again.
Microsoft release updates every 2 weeks so even if you keep all your data on an external drive you would still have the prospect of losing weeks or months of updates, and as said before Microsoft release major updates every 6 months, so even if you restored your clone you would have an outdated version of windowsThen, you said “... your mirror image backups (cloning) are only useful if you keep them up to date, so a cloning is of limited value here.
I agree but (a) I rarely add new application programs and (b) as I said before, I keep the data in an external drive.
Yes sorry that was a typo.You said “There is no benefit in using an DVD instead of an iso.” By “iso” you mean an USB drive?
You are of course free to choose any method you wish, bit it would be remiss of us not to point out the pitfalls as well as the advantages in your thinking.You are right, but, as I said before, given that (a) I rarely add new programs and (b) I keep the data in an external drive, shouldn't I pick a solution that I understand?
Hey David!Microsoft release updates every 2 weeks so even if you keep all your data on an external drive you would still have the prospect of losing weeks or months of updates, and as said before Microsoft release major updates every 6 months, so even if you restored your clone you would have an outdated version of windows
I repeat again Cloning is not a complete backup solution - it is most useful for doing disaster recovery when you are performing critical windows procedures or moving windows to bigger or smaller drives etc, not for regular day to day backups.
Yes sorry that was a typo.
You are of course free to choose any method you wish, bit it would be remiss of us not to point out the pitfalls as well as the advantages in your thinking.
David
Jey John!If you have problems with damaging hard drives, you need to look into how its happening and stop that process. Is this a laptop or desktop? Buy backup software that will do incremental backups daily to an external drive. Then this backup software should have an option for bootable media to actually transfer that backup to a new hard drive in case of disaster. Or if its a desktop and has the option for raid then you can run Raid 1 which mirrors the data on one drive to the other in case of disaster.