From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Sat, 12/20/2025 12:45 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:   
      
   > Macrium will happily put the image file anywhere you tell it, including   
   > on the same "drive" as the Macrium itself if it's writable; my concern   
   > was that the OP might not have anywhere with enough room. (And my   
   > Macrium is on a DVD, so not writable.)   
      
   Just because a thing is possible, doesn't mean you should do it :-)   
      
   The problem with USB TLC sticks, is they are fragile, and they die   
   way way before the predicted flash wear cycle count is reached.   
      
   Boot sticks, like a Macrium boot stick, should be run by the   
   user as "read only", and in that way, we hope to find the stick   
   boots, every time we go to use it.   
      
   If you want to stick an SSD on the end of a USB cable, that's OK,   
   as the drive has internal wear leveling, and spreads the wear better,   
   and it is less likely to break after only seven backups. There   
   are even a few (fat,ungainly) USB sticks which are actually SSDs   
   inside. It's hard to put a conventional stick next to one though,   
   as they are too fat.   
      
   *******   
      
   As far as I know, there is some option to put the WinPE Macrium   
   boots from, right on the C: drive. This is no good for "bare metal restore"   
   particularly, but, if you want to do "partition at rest" backups   
   or clones, it might be a useful option. Then you would not   
   need any USB stick to boot it and make a clone. You'd still   
   need the SSD drive you are cloning to, of course.   
      
   I haven't tried this, so don't have the first hand experience to comment.   
      
   Macrium has a PDF manual, and you should find the version for   
   your product and keep a copy handy.   
      
      Name: macrium_reflect_v7_user_guide.pdf                 # 422 pages   
      Size: 13,353,472 bytes (12 MiB)   
      SHA256: EF8DA7AF2A80DE711D6C87606995AFBDE72C3569282407D9C8CFEAB290BD6954   
      
      Name: macrium_reflect_v8.0_user_guide.pdf               # 485 pages   
      Size: 13,872,300 bytes (13 MiB)   
      SHA256: DF38E8D0F7D5AFCF3105CFD6ED33094CCF20E5F9F0895977E0548A5D3422A3C2   
      
        Paul   
      
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