Two things:
- Deprecated does not mean removed.
- In my case, I was able to create the system image from 1709 but not restore.
The long-winded answers are pointless. Yes, MS recommends using a third party tool so that at some point in the future when the status goes from deprecated to removed users won't be left high and dry, but the tool they provide to do the job currently creates backups just fine. It fails to restore. Period. That's broken. Not deprecated.
I agree, it is broken!
It works fine with the old Legacy machines.
It also works on a UEFI machines as long as you don't need to reformat the disk.
If you try a restore to a different disk it needs to recreate the partitions and reformat, that is the phase when it fails.
Using third party programs is not a solution as suggested by some in this thread.
Microsoft needs to fix the bug.
Another problem with third party programs is that you need to create a bootable disk or USB stick for every PC, because they just setup the drivers for the PC where you create the bootable media.
The windows installation media works pretty much on every PC unless you need some new driver that is not yet included.
I surely don't want to keep a separate bootable recovery media for every different PC I have to deal with :(