USB drives images that might be worth storing While the utilities we'll be covering are especially relevant for backing up bootable USB drives or those with multiple partitions, they can come in handy any time that you would like to clone one USB drive to another or overwrite your drive and easily restore the contents. The ability to make backup images of bootable USB drives seems particularly useful for testing several portable operating systems, such as 'Windows To Go' or any of the various Linux distros, and we would like to explore pen drive platforms in a future article. We also learned that in the case of a Windows 10 installation USB drive, you can simply copy all of the setup files from the thumb drive to another destination, then copy them back, and still have a bootable installation media. However, while Windows 10 has a fully interfaced feature for making backup images of the operating system, we couldn't find any way to create an image file of a USB drive.Īlthough we were seeking a simple command line or native GUI wizard to create a full image backup of a bootable USB drive, we were happy to discover several lightweight tools that can get the job done, including one that you might already have installed for making boot drives in the first place like Rufus.
Having not cloned a bootable USB drive before, the operation seemed like something that could be accomplished from a Command Prompt or elsewhere around Windows. Intending to save some time and effort on the next go-around, we sought methods to preserve an exact copy of bootable USB drives which could be restored from a backup file when needed. In the case of Windows 10, unless you saved an ISO of the operating system instead of making a USB installation drive with Microsoft's media creation tool, or still have your USB drive configured, you will likely have to redownload the entire OS the next time you need the installation files on a bootable drive. Do you keep a bootable USB drive handy? Maybe you still have the USB drive that you last used to install Windows, or any of the other bootable thumb drives that you've made over the years? Since we only tend to keep a few USB drives available, we tend to overwrite the contents of Windows installation media and the like after a single use.
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