Just a heads up on an issue I ran into this week. I built my own computer to run Blue Iris security software on it. I imaged the computer once I had everything installed. Monday night at some point the SSD that had the OS and software on it died. Stupidly I never made another image of it after I had all the tweaks made to Blue Iris. So I replaced the SSD and put the image I had on the new SSD. Everything came up fine but I could not get Windows update to push it from 1709 to 1909. I tried Windows Update Assistant and did some mods to the DISM folder, nothing worked. I ended up just doing a clean install of Windows 10.

For those that make images for your PC's, it probably isn't a bad idea to make new images for each step release for Windows 10. Maybe someone can avoid what I ran into.

Dumb question.
What is the easiest way to image your PC?

Granted my BlueIris machine is just that. I have my BlueIris file saved to a drive but not the entire PC.

Looks like I am going to a e to upgrade to Blue Iris 5 since Blue Iris 4 lost push notifications to the app and it is no longer sending email alerts.

So guess this would be a good time to do it.

I use Macrium Reflect Free
https://www.macrium.com/products/home

I really need to automate it as well.

Have you looked into BI 6?

Pretty sure Blue Iris 5 is the newest

You are correct

As an Apple guy, I don’t know what an “image” is. Don’t PCs have some facility similar to Apple Time Machine that makes incremental backups? A sophisticated indexing system makes each incremental backup appear to be a full backup, but takes much less disk space.

My experiences with Windows backup and restore over the years has been less than impressive. I think they have implemented a new backup and restore option in 10, but I am not sure and honestly don't care. Macrium works for me so far. You can do incremental backups with Macrium as well.

Nothing wrong with multiple images but all you need is a good backup program and run it regularly.
A great free option is Veeam Microsoft Agent - has saved many client computers and even some of my own.
It is not the only good software out there , use what works for you.
If it is current then you should be GTG.
No clue on your update issues~ could be anything.
The lesson here isn't that updates fail it is that you need to have a current backup plan.

Yep, this is on me. I should have had a more recent image.