SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Can someobne please tell me, of limited IT knowledge, why when I try to optimize this stick I am told that that is not possible.

I want to use NFTS to creat a system image for  a PC as a back up and have tried on Windows 7 and 10.

Many thanks.

Craibh

Hello, 

i would like to inform you that the sandisk usb drives are not manufactured to be used as backup disks or bootable drives. there are specialized drives marked as windows to go that can be used with this features and are compatible also

What a pity that the fact that they are seriously unsuited for back up purposes is not made plain on the advertising material  so that customers are not mislead as to the nature of the product- which I think, is certainly what I feel and with real justification.Perhaps SanDisk do not care.

Craibh

I don’t agree with deponia.  IMO any flash drive can be made to be bootable, and used for backups.  The backup issue depends on the backup app being used rather than the flash drive.  Windows does have a Windows to Go function that requires a flash drive that is set to be a fixed drive rather than a removable drive.  But Windows 10 backup, really a Windows 7 backup, doesn’t require a fixed drive nor do many backup apps.

The Ultra should be factory formated as exFAT which will handle large files and does not need to be reformated to NTFS.

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I’m pretty sure deponia is wrong - what’s the purpose of having a flash drive if you can’t back your files up?

I’m running Win7 64bit and have created both backups and repair disks on a SanDisk Extreme usb 3.0 and on an Ultra USB 3.0 - no issues!  what I did do is format it to exFAT as my disk image was kinda huge (around 15GB) so it couldn’t be stored in FAT32.   

Most operating systems ask for removable drives for backup and image file creation so just make sure that your drive shows up as removable and is formatted to either exFAT or NTFS and you should be good to go.  If you buy a large drive (64gb and above) it should be formatted to exFAT already.  

If not check if your drive’s working fine otherwise. 

You can try AOMEI Backupper to back system and optimize your SanDisk Drive, since those are utilities of it.