If I could fit a clone of my 256GB WTG drive into a 115GB Silicon Power reference drive, I would have a wider selection of target drives (including that 128GB Samsung) in a pinch. For instance, I found that a 128GB Samsung Bar USB drive had a working capacity of 119.51GB, while a Silicon Power 128GB USB had only 115.45GB – for a difference of over 4GB. I would want the smallest reference drive size capable of holding the contents of the WTG drive (e.g., 128GB rather than 256GB), and I would want the smallest drive model within a given size category (e.g., the 128GB USB drive with the smallest capacity), because this would maximize my future cloning options. (In Ubuntu, lsblk -ba) would provide similar information.) Plug in the USB drives to be compared do that for each of those drives and compare the Capacity figures. I could compare the total sizes of two drives by using Windows File Explorer > right-click on a drive > Properties > General tab. Continuing with the present example, not all 128GB USB drives were the same size. Ideally, a reference drive would be not only the smallest drive capable of containing the temporarily shrunken partitions of the working WTG drive, but also the smallest drive within its size category. For me, with at least a half-dozen different reference drives and infrequent need for any of them, it seemed more practical to use little old drives for which I had no other need.) At present, 256GB Samsung USBs were still about $22, compared to $6 for a 128GB Silicon Power. But for this drive that would just sit on the shelf, I didn’t want to be deterred by the higher cost of the larger drive.
I did tend to keep a clone handy, so I had two copies of the drives that I used most, and I could clone them back and forth in case of damage or significant upgrade. (Some users might prefer to avoid that hassle: just make the reference drive the same size as the WTG drive, and then it would always be easy to update. So then, if I needed a source drive for cloning, I could dust off that 128GB reference drive, clone it to a 256GB USB drive, make sure it booted OK, and then configure the resulting 256GB system to undo those space-saving steps (e.g., re-enable hibernation, set a larger pagefile, enlarge partitions). These days, with hibernation and a large pagefile and all sorts of other stuff, I needed a 256GB USB drive to hold and run it in an optimal form.īut if I disabled hibernation, minimized the pagefile, used a partitioning tool (e.g., MiniTool Partition Wizard in Windows, GParted in Ubuntu) to shrink partitions to just a little above their minimum possible size, and took other steps indicated in that other post, I could still squeeze the WTG drive into a 128GB space. The size of the Win10 installation had grown. As described in another post, I used DiskGenius to clone the Windows 10 installation from my desktop computer onto a USB drive. My working example was my Windows To Go (WTG) USB drive.
I could use a smaller (and slower, and older) USB drive as a physical backup device as long as it was large enough to hold the contents of a larger drive. The primary idea behind the reference drive was that the latest drives were larger and faster. This post discusses some of the questions and options that came up, as I set about the process of creating and using Windows and Ubuntu USB reference drives. Their purpose would mostly be to just sit on a shelf until a moment of need, preserving their contents without taking space on a data drive and without being vulnerable to whatever might befall such drives. I referred to these little old drives as “reference” drives. But since they were small and old, the better solution in most cases would be to clone them to a larger and faster target drive, and then use the target drive to boot the operating system.
In a pinch, I could run the operating system from one of those drives. It occurred to me that one legitimate end-of-life role for relatively smaller and older USB drives would be to treat them as working physical repositories of recent versions of Windows or Linux system drives. For instance, they might be stored on a drive that I couldn’t get to at the moment, for one reason or another. Meanwhile, sometimes I found that backup drive images weren’t always an ideal solution. As faster and newer USB drives became available and affordable, I began to accumulate little old USB drives that I didn’t really need anymore.