usb flash drive not a valid backup location for system image

That was impressive!

Hi UPSPilot, 

Found your explanation of much interest. Being a newbie to this I would appreciate your offer to send a PDF file that delineates the differences between a System Image and a Recovery Drive. From what I read in your response to "Shakey", you summed it up nicely and I believe the PDF file will be the icing on the cake.

My address is : ******@wi.rr.com

As you can find time I would greatly appreciate your valuable assistance.

Thank you very much

what username?

OK, I've just spent the last hour reading this whole topic. But what's the answer?

I bought my wife a new Windows 10 PC a couple of month ago, and successfully backed up a system image to a USB stick. The system image fitted on it because it was "out of the box" and we hadn't yet installed any additional software or migrated my wife's documents or pictures. Being new to Windows 10, I thought no more about it. I wanted a system image and I got one.

But, then, I bought a new Windows 10 laptop a week or so ago (for myself) but have completely failed to create a system image. 

1. My own USB stick has 64 GBytes free and is NTFS. My C: drive is smaller (only 46 GBytes) as I've not yet installed much (just Office 2013). Yet, unlike my wife's new PC, the restore immediately aborts with the message, "The drive is not a backup location." No explanation is provided as to why it is "not a backup location".
2. I then tried writing the system image to an external IOMEGA drive on my home network. The drive has plenty of space and, this time, the process seemed to be working and, oh joy, the green horizontal progress bar was creeping ever closer to the right hand side. But after a couple of hours, when I was really getting hopeful, the scroll bar SUDDENLY turned red with the message, "The file or directory is corrupt or unreadable (0x80070570)."

Which file? Which directory? And which is it? Corrupt or unreadable? Don't you just hate those "either / or" messages, especially when accompanied by the hugely uninformative (0x80070570). What does that mean?

I also have a My Passport drive and suppose I could try writing the system image to there - but how on earth would one restore it? My Passport has an unlocker program to unlock the main partition where the system image would be written. But if you were trying to restore a system image from a My Passport drive, there wouldn't be anything on the Windows 10 Recovery DVD (Yes! I've created one of those!) capable of executing the unlocker program..

What shall I do? Go to my nearest PC store and buy a load of DVDs and try to burn the system image to them? I've already wasted money on a new 64 GBytes USB stick.

Windows 10 just seems to be riddled with issues - both my wife's new computer and my own had corrupted Windows 10s and have both had to be restored to factory settings. This whole new operating system is (apologies) a pile of sh*t and should never have been released in such an untested state. We have been wrestling with this awful software for days now.

OK, rant over. But how actually do I create a system image? If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, PLEASE tell me.

Hi,

Just give up and buy a large (space) outboard drive (I have a small 1 TB Samsung) and it seems to work fine for File History and System Image. It is small 11cm x 8cm x 1cm and does the trick. The other thing I gave up on was OneDrive (old SkyDrive) as they now start to charge you if your email of other files are too big. I also got crashes related to it. Just disable it. (follow your browser instructions of - 'how to get rid of OneDrive'). Windows 10 automatically starts you using OneDrive, then tries to force you to pay for over 5GB (sky)space. OneDrive is the new name given to SkyDrive by MS.

Windows 10 seems OK otherwise. Hope this helps.