Is there a way to make the bootable rescue USB so it loads the the backup immediately when booting from the USB, avoiding all the clicks to restore the image?

Also I have a second Hard drive, that I would like to be formatted automatically when applying the image, is this possible?

You would have to try this yourself to be sure, but in the past, when I've scheduled a restore through REFLECT without a Rescue Media "installed" in the BOOT menu... REFLECT went through all tghe motions and setup for a restore, it just did not state that a reBOOT would do it for you and you'd have to use a separate PE.  When I BOOTed the System using a USB-based Rescue Media, the automatic restore setup by REFLECT activated in the same way it would if you were using a BOOT menu version of the Rescue Media.

I will test once again for the heck of it...

Reflect has an Automatic System Restore feature that allows you to restore a specific image backup when booting from Rescue without any further clicks required.  That's designed for kiosk-type PCs that might need to be reset to a known good baseline on a regular basis.  That's described here.  But there's no way to have Reflect automatically restore the most recent backup at any given time, and I would argue that this would be quite dangerous.

I don't know of a way to have Reflect automatically format some other disk that isn't the target of an image restore operation.  I'm sure that if you knew how to customize Windows PE directly you might be able to do that, but even that might be a bit tricky because Windows PE (which is what Reflect Rescue runs on) doesn't always assign drive letters the same way that Windows does, and in fact a given partition might be assigned a different drive letter on successive boots depending on what other disks might be connected at the time.  So if you tried to have an automatic "format D:" command, you might end up formatting different volumes.  You'd have to do something to uniquely identify the target partition irrespective of drive letter.  But again this would all be a manual customization of Reflect's Windows PE environment.

+x

 

Froggie - 8 July 2020 2:49 PM

You would have to try this yourself to be sure, but in the past, when I've scheduled a restore through REFLECT without a Rescue Media "installed" in the BOOT menu... REFLECT went through all tghe motions and setup for a restore, it just did not state that a reBOOT would do it for you and you'd have to use a separate PE.  When I BOOTed the System using a USB-based Rescue Media, the automatic restore setup by REFLECT activated in the same way it would if you were using a BOOT menu version of the Rescue Media.

I will test once again for the heck of it...

I've tested this and, although a touch convoluted now, still does the same thing.  If you select an automatic restore of any snapshot image, and no BOOT menu item has been installed, it will ask you if you want to create that BOOT menu item.  If you say no it will move on and tell you that it needs an external Rescue Media (USB) PE to finish the operation.  At this point it has set up the automatic restoration criteria to be used by the external Recovery Media.

If you reBOOT your System into the external Recovery Media, it will start the automatic restoration selection unless you say no.

When restoring an image to any storage media, pre-formatting of that image is not required.