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On our test laptop, for example, we had a 100GB SSD, 75GB of that was filled up, and the compressed image in the end was only 50GB. So, for example, if you have a 2TB external drive that you have a few hundred GB of photos backed up on, you can also use it (space permitting) to backup your Windows disk image with no risk to your photos or other data.Īlthough we advise you to have enough space for the whole drive, in reality the disk likely isn’t full and compression will buy you some wiggle room. As long as you have the space you can use any drive you have on hand as long as it can hold the drive image. We aren’t cloning your Windows drive onto a new bootable drive so we don’t need a fresh storage drive or a drive we can wipe. A USB drive to turn into a restoration drive (minimum size 1GB).Ī few points of consideration before we proceed.An internal or external hard drive with enough capacity to hold the contents of the drive you wish to image.A copy of Macrium Reflect Free (available for download here).To follow along with us today you’ll need the following things: What Do I Need?Īs we highlighted in the introduction this procedure is free (unless you need an additional internal or external hard drive to house the drive image).

We’ll complete it using free tools, it doesn’t cost anything (unless you need to purchase an extra drive to store the image on), and it hardly takes any time (especially when you compare it to the hassle of reinstalling your old version of Windows and reconfiguring everything). We can’t emphasize enough how important this step is. This drive image will remain clean and unchanged independently of anything we do to the computer during the upgrade process and thereafter so even if we format the drives, even if we use Windows 10 for six months and decide we really don’t like it, we can turn right back around and use the image we’ve created to turn back the clock and restore our computer to the exact state it was in before the upgrade.

We want a perfect pre-upgrade copy we can call upon to restore the system. In order to do that we need to image the drive. You want the clear and precise ability to wipe the entire drive clean and restore it, bit for bit, to the exact state it was in before you even started the upgrade process. When it comes to a change as big as jumping from Windows 7 or Windows 8 to the barely charted waters of Windows 10, however, you don’t want to rely on snapshots and rollback features to help you return to the safety of a prior version of Windows. Over the years we’ve covered plenty of ways to use the tools built into Windows to perform snapshots, create backups, and otherwise help you to restore your computer to a prior state if your hardware upgrades or such go awry.