How to create an Acer recovery drive in the newer Windows 11 acer A515-45-R1BF

thank you StevenGen :) ... between your post and the one below that I cannot believe I forgot to include in my original post (read this over, aphanic gives a wonderful guide with pictures/screenshots walking you through exactly how to use macrium reflect free edition)

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/610886/guide-how-to-back-up-a-system-or-clone-a-drive-with-macrium-reflect#latest

it's reassuring to know that people in the acer community have successfully used the free version of macrium reflect to restore their acer computer .... with all the different partitions (recovery drive and so forth) you have to restore plus the fact that I see it as the "acer version of windows" I'm always a bit nervous compared to say the person who builds their own desktop PC and then buys and installs their own version of windows (which I've also done but... well I have yet to come across a kit that lets you assemble your own laptop :P so I tend to default to the acer aspire laptops as a purchase).

I wish I could tell people based on my own personal experience that Macrium reflect free will work just as well restoring Windows 11 as it does Win 10 , I find myself wondering if that is the case given how Windows 11 does the secure boot thing and so forth (total speculation on my part, I have no idea how secure boot works and/or how and if it affects recovering an image)... and like most people I find myself hoping I'll never have to restore from a backup and that the laptop continues to happily chug along it's way doing it's thing :) , I am incredibly lucky for example in that my 7 year old acer aspire laptop has not once needed to have windows restored back onto it and is still happily chugging along ... having said that especially given that macrium reflect is free and that I have read reports online of people who use Win 11 successfully using it to restore their Win 11 installation (and obviously of course if you're using Win 10 or below ) I absolutely encourage people to use it... or the free version of Ease US Todo .... something, ANY sort of free backup software to at least have that image ready and waiting to be restored from. Based on my internet research a lot of people are extremely happy with Macrium Reflect and actually prefer the free version of it to the paid version of Acronis I am using on my Windows 10 computers which kind of blew my mind :P

I have no idea how bad of an idea it would be to go on using the free version of Macrium Reflect now that they've stopped offering security patches for it (though again I would argue a backup image without security patches is a lot better than no backup at all) ... I know as far as pricing it's $70 for a license which is pretty expensive but it's a lifetime license... apparently on Black Friday in the past it's been discounted to half price. In the long run less expensive than paying basically forever for a subscription model of backup software... but the advantage to a subscription model is that they typically offer cloud based storage which is really nice, as long as you can get online you can restore that image of your Windows installation from the online server they're storing it on... there are some horror stories out there about viruses that lock up EVERY hard drive on your computer until you pay the ransom (and they may even refuse to unlock the drives if you pay the ransom anyways) ... so that bootable usb drive is in my opinion absolutely mandatory at least you can get your laptop up and running back to the default acer factory condition and hopefully with the macrium reflect bootable usb drive you can even restore your laptop including files to the way it was.

If you're lucky enough to have a computer with two hard drives... for example the acer aspire laptops often come with a hard drive kit that lets you install a second hard drive into the laptop... I'd recommend creating that backup image onto the second hard drive in case your "C" windows drive gets so corrupted that even the backup image on it is lost ...alternately external hard drives that connect by a usb cable have been going down in price steadily (definitely look for deals on them around black friday , I signed up for alerts on the slickdeals website and have snagged some great deals that way as long as you take the time to set alerts for the deals you're looking for) , I would argue it's worth the price to buy one of those and create an image on that too using macrium reflect or ease us todo or what not at least every few months ... and while you're at it frequently (say once a week or at least once a month) save the important files you would be upset about losing onto that external drive too... unplug the drive to keep it safe from that hacker attack I mentioned earlier and just keep it lying around and hope you never have to use it to restore an image or files or what not but it's worth the peace of mind to have it handy and ready to go :) ...

Somewhat unrelated but worth bearing in mind ... if you're looking at buying a new acer desktop or laptop do your research and make sure it's capable of being upgraded to Windows 11, the hardware requirements can be somewhat demanding. Some acer desktops and laptops at the time I type this are still being sold with Windows 10 on it and while that's fine right now, come October 2025 when Microsoft stops releasing security patches for Windows 10 that's going to be a real problem for the hapless Windows 10 user... personally if it was me I would look for a computer with an SSD drive that it boots from (2.5 form factor or the "stick shaped" m.2 drive, stick shaped is faster) and 16 GB of ram or alternately make sure you can add an SSD drive and/or ram to it (another reason why I like the acer aspire laptops , the upgradability options) to boost it's performance if necessary... it's been my experience that just because you can upgrade a PC from an earlier to later version of Windows doesn't mean it won't slow down the PC, our poor family friend had this experience when he listened to Microsoft and upgraded to Win 10 on his laptop and sure it's got those security patches and that's very important but now it runs a heck of a lot more slowly given how more demanding Win 10 is compared to Win 7 or Win 8 or whatever he had on his laptop previously (I tried to help him speed up the laptop as best as I could but there was a limit to what I could do) .. the bigger the hard drive the better and I'd say at least a ryzen 3 AMD processor or intel core i3 processor.. just because the PC meets the minimum requirements to run Win 11 doesn't mean it will do so smoothly so beware.

That is an excellent point and something I completely forgot about thank you for mentioning that!

Me personally since I'm the paranoid sort I would want to do exactly what you described above as far as creating a system image using the tool built into Windows and also use say Macrium Reflect free to create an image, so if one doesn't work the other does.... plus the bootable usb drive (or drives if you're like me and have the bootable acer recovery drive and the bootable macrium reflect drive) in a worst case scenario where you do end up with one of those nasty "hijack viruses" that lock you out of every single drive on the computer... hopefully not but you never know, I had one very nice relative use my computer and install a virus on it without even realizing she did it :P (she was sending an email greeting card and ended up using a not so great website to do so but that's on me for not setting up and having her use a guest account with limited privileges such that she couldn't install anything even accidentally to begin with).

Also .. and completely forgot to mention this earlier ! ... a cheap usb 2.0 , 16 GB or bigger thumb drive will work just fine as far as creating the recovery drives... during Black Friday sales I've found that amazon discounts the PNY brand of usb 2.0 , 32 GB drives to as cheap as.. trying to remember maybe four or five dollars per usb drive? Of course you get what you pay for and some of them are defective right off the bat so you'd want to test them... transfer a file onto it , preferably a file you can edit (say a text file) right there on the thumb drive, transfer the file back onto windows and see if the file survived and is still in the same format (so again you'd want to look for the "shipped by amazon" and "free returns" option, pain in the butt having to drop it off at your local ups store for a refund but if you're doing it around black friday sale time you have a very long return window.. until January 31st if memory serves me correctly.. and you can just wait and gather up all the stuff you'll inevitable return through your local UPS store and do it all at once, this is just a given for me every holiday season).. so order enough of them to have recovery drives for all your acer computers... . I imagine a usb 3.0 speed drive would work faster and be just fine too though I haven't personally tested it since I'm cheap and go for the usb 2.0 drives for recovery drive purposes - and there are sales on those too, right now the pny usb 3.0 , 32 gb drive is selling for five dollars on amazon... ebay is an option to get them cheap too long as it's from a reliable seller.