I am out in the sticks on a slow connection, so big downloads take ages. I made a successful repair disk for my M.2 PCIE drive set up on Win 7 64 bit Pro by selecting ME10 and allowing it to download ME10 files from Microsoft. If I want to make a spare repair disc do I have to download ME10 "stuff" again, or can I point Reflect at the saved copy of it please? Thanks!

As long as you didn't delete the files, there is no need to download them again.  Future updates to Reflect might update the Rescue Media files again, which may require a download of a new package, though.

Thanks, I came in here whining about how much space on my new M.2 PCIE drive was being used up by "stuff" and was guided to leave them be, so now the idea of a spare rescue diskhas come  in to my head, I am now glad I did leave them

If you're using WinPE, you can download the files as a ZIP from the Download Agent and save that ZIP file somewhere, say on a flash drive or USB HDD.  That way, there won't be a need to download the files again.  You can just point Reflect to the ZIP file.  Unless they build a new build of the WinPE files, which they might on Windows 10.  I would guess if they do get updated, Reflect will detect if they need to be downloaded again.

Expanding on the information already provided, after you download the WinPE files for a given WinPE version, Reflect caches them so that you don't need to redownload them for subsequent Rescue Media builds.  If you use the WinRE option available in Reflect 7.2, Reflect uses the files from your system's hidden Windows Recovery partition, in which case you never need to download anything at all.

Microsoft does not update WinPE files on any sort of a regular basis like they do with Windows update.  Newer versions of WinPE 10 are created with each new major release of Windows 10, but Reflect 7.2 currently always uses WinPE 10 1709.  Earlier versions of V7 and the latest version of V6 use WinPE 10 1607.  The end result is that unless Macrium decides to update Reflect to start using a newer version of WinPE 10, you'll never need to redownload the WinPE 10 files again unless they get deleted for some reason.  By default, the PE files are preserved even if you uninstall Reflect, but you can choose to delete them if desired.

As for Windows RE, your Recovery partition gets updated whenever you update your system to a new major release of Windows 10.  If that happens, Reflect will automatically start using the new files, although that can become a bit of a liability.  For example, if there's a bug in the new files from Microsoft that affects Rescue Media, then your Rescue Media builds might be broken after you update Windows 10.  For that reason, there's something to be said for using WinPE 10 instead, since it is a fixed and tested "foundation".  The only catch there is that if you want WiFi support in your Rescue Media environment, you have to use WinRE.  But even in that case, it's not a bad idea to have the WinPE 10 files handy to make an "emergency" build if you find out one day that your WinRE builds don't work anymore.  Another thing you can do is generate ISO files of your Rescue Media builds and save them for a while.  That will protect you from issues created by new WinRE versions as well as new Reflect versions.  There have been cases where Reflect updates broke the Rescue environment, and since Macrium doesn't provide installers for previous Reflect versions (and some people might not want to roll back their entire system just to undo a Reflect update), having ISO files of previous confirmed working Rescue Media builds can be a fantastic "insurance policy".

You might want to do what I do.  Every time I build new Rescue Media to flash drive, I also create ISO's.  Then, I put the ISO's on my flash drive in their own dedicated folder so they don't get touched.  Rescue Media builder only touches the files and folders on the flash drive that it needs to update, so you can store other contents on the flash drive.  So, there is something to be said for using a higher capacity flash drive for Rescue Media for storing things like ISO's and even image files on.  Of course, you'd need a dual partition system on the flash drive, one formatted as FAT32 for the bootable part and the rest formatted as NTFS to store the generally greater than 4 GB image file sizes, unless you split the backups.  Besides, NTFS is generally the better file system, however, creating this dual partition setup isn't exactly straight forward.

+x

 

dbminter - 8 September 2019 3:54 PM

If you're using WinPE, you can download the files as a ZIP from the Download Agent and save that ZIP file somewhere, say on a flash drive or USB HDD.  That way, there won't be a need to download the files again.  You can just point Reflect to the ZIP file.  Unless they build a new build of the WinPE files, which they might on Windows 10.  I would guess if they do get updated, Reflect will detect if they need to be downloaded again.

interesting, I dont get an option to choose my download path which annoyed me as I dont want everything on my system drive.

+x

 

chrcoluk - 23 September 2019 8:16 AM

interesting, I dont get an option to choose my download path which annoyed me as I dont want everything on my system drive.

The download agent allows you to choose where you want to download the ZIP file if you want to keep it stored somewhere.  But that's separate from the extracted WinPE files that Reflect keeps on your drive in order to actually build Rescue Media.  To my knowledge that has to stay in Reflect's ProgramData folder.