I am successfully backing up my laptop with Macrium and am about to create a bootable Rescue Media USB Drive.
I have been fairly successfully sorting out corruption of a User Profile but I am uneasy about postponing the creation while I finish doing this as it is quite complicated.
My question is if I go ahead and create the Rescue Media, when I have finished sorting out my User files can I delete the Rescue Media easily and create a fresh one ?
Sorry if the answer seems obvious.  It is not obvious to me and I would obviously prefer not to run the risk of having to boot into one which may have traces of corruption in the system.

You can create new rescue media at any time. Once created,  test it often to ensure that it boots the computer and can see all the internal and external disks that are used to create and store the images you will make.

The rescue media does not care about your user profile, it is created to work independently of the OS, in fact it can be used when there is NOT OS to restore a backup to a new drive for instance.  If Macrium Runs, you can create the recovery media.  In fact if the drive hardware is close enough you can use a recovery media from another MR instance.  

You can create or recreate the recovery media at any point.  If you are concerned about anything from the previous version of recovery media being left on the disk simply delete any and all partitions on the USB stick and run the media creation tool again. 

While it's not what you asked about, I'll tell you what I use.  I have a bunch of USB drives, thumb drives and USB HDDs.  I installed a cool multiboot tool named Ventoy on them.  I create a MR recovery media as an ISO file.  I put this ISO file on the Ventoy media partition and I can boot to it using Ventoy.  I have about 14 MR Recovery media ISOs on my drive.  Most are redundant as I can use nearly ANY ISO on just about any computer, but I create them and put them on the drive just to be sure I am totally ready to restore the OS at any moment.   I have a bunch of other ISO files I can boot to, ranging from Linux live OS ISO files to recovery media and even Windows installation ISOs.  When booting the Ventoy stick I am presented with a menu of ISO choices and I just select which one I want to boot from.  It is super easy to setup.  I make my 'master' USB drive - the thumb drive I keep in my pocket.  Then I use a sync utility to copy the ISO payloads to a folder on my desktop, then I use the same sync utility to copy them to all my other sticks.  Ventoy is easily updated without destroying the drives contents, the initial installation wipes the drive though. 

+x

 

Rootman - 28 April 2023 11:13 AM

The rescue media does not care about your user profile, it is created to work independently of the OS, in fact it can be used when there is NOT OS to restore a backup to a new drive for instance.  If Macrium Runs, you can create the recovery media.  In fact if the drive hardware is close enough you can use a recovery media from another MR instance.  

You can create or recreate the recovery media at any point.  If you are concerned about anything from the previous version of recovery media being left on the disk simply delete any and all partitions on the USB stick and run the media creation tool again. 

While it's not what you asked about, I'll tell you what I use.  I have a bunch of USB drives, thumb drives and USB HDDs.  I installed a cool multiboot tool named Ventoy on them.  I create a MR recovery media as an ISO file.  I put this ISO file on the Ventoy media partition and I can boot to it using Ventoy.  I have about 14 MR Recovery media ISOs on my drive.  Most are redundant as I can use nearly ANY ISO on just about any computer, but I create them and put them on the drive just to be sure I am totally ready to restore the OS at any moment.   I have a bunch of other ISO files I can boot to, ranging from Linux live OS ISO files to recovery media and even Windows installation ISOs.  When booting the Ventoy stick I am presented with a menu of ISO choices and I just select which one I want to boot from.  It is super easy to setup.  I make my 'master' USB drive - the thumb drive I keep in my pocket.  Then I use a sync utility to copy the ISO payloads to a folder on my desktop, then I use the same sync utility to copy them to all my other sticks.  Ventoy is easily updated without destroying the drives contents, the initial installation wipes the drive though. 

I don't see anything wrong with this scheme of using ventoy to boot ISO files, but I feel compelled to point out that this is not necessary using just Reflect and Windows.  Whenever I use Rescue Media Builder (RMB) to create a new version of Rescue Media (RM) on a flash drive, it puts the bootable RM as the first partition on the flash drive.  I also have created an NTFS partition beyond that bootable partition, and I also use RMB to create an ISO file version of the new RM and store it on the second partition.   The directory on this second partition accumulates RM builds and versions for all of my systems.  If I ever need a previous version, or one that works on a different kind of system than the one in the bootable partition, I can plug the flash drive into ANY working Windows system, find the RM ISO file for the broken system, mount that ISO file and copy all of the contents to the first partition on the flash drive. I can then take that flash drive and use it on the broken system. I've never had to do this, but feel a lot better to have previous versions of RM for all of my systems JUST IN CASE.  My thanks to @jphughan who gave me the idea. 


L.W. (Dan) Danz, Overland Park KS
Reflect v8.1.7638+ on Windows 11 Home 22H2-22621.2283+