Little storage problem: can I store a full working copy of windows 11 on my laptop's hard drive?

[Mark Kaine]

I have a 250gb drive with windows 11 and some other stuff on it, that i want to erase for use in my desktop,  but the question is can I just copy the contents of the 250gb drive onto my laptop (win 10) there are 2 partitions C and D but on the same 2TB drive,  or can this be problematic because windows might try to boot from the win 11 "installation"? Actually,  i think thats an issue... but what should i do then? Can I compress the stuff on the 250gb drive before storing it on my laptop,  would that work ? Or do I need a backup software? I'm not sure how that would work though since the 250gb drive isn't actually installed anywhere,  its technically just an external USB drive right now.  

[Catsrules]

If you want to keep the Win 11 installation intact then you need some kind of a backup software to create an Image of the drive, so it can be restored back to the drive at a later date. I really haven't look for a backup software that supports Windows 11. My usual go to Veem Endpoint for the backup. But I don't know if it is supported yet. Also it would require you boot up into the Win 11 one the 250GB to install Veeam.

Clonezilla might work as well.

 

 

If you don't care about the Win11 installation and just want the files and documents then just copy the files you want over to your laptop.

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

If you want to keep the Win 11 installation intact then you need some kind of a backup software to create an Image of the drive, so it can be restored back to the drive at a later date

Right, i see, thats what I actually want, so I would need to swap back the 250gb drive then make a backup to the 2TB (win 10) drive... 

But im just wondering what would happen if I just compress the 250gb drive say with 7zip... *why* wouldn't that work also, i could just decompress it on another drive later? How would windows even know i did that... ?

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

Oh, I think I see why just copying/ compressing wouldn't work... because there are those uefi/recovery partitions which it doesn't look are even accessible... ?

guess I'll just swap the drives and make a normal backup then - which i hope will work with win11...