The best advice I'd give to someone experimenting with MX Snapshot is "don't cheap out on your USB thumb drive". There are plenty of threads on this forum created by people who got into trouble trying to be clever about backing up X amount of data to a Y-sized storage device and either X is bigger than Y or Y was just a hair's breadth bigger than X and then we get "that should work/why doesn't it work/is MX Snapshot broken/what's wrong with my computer?/fix it fix it fix it help plz!".FullScale4Me wrote: Wed Feb 26, 2025 3:06 pm 2) The media you bootup to initiate the (final) 'bare metal' install will have to be large enough to have the snapshot ISO 'burned' to it.
Ensure there is greater than 2 times the size of your snapshot free disk space on the PC being snapshotted. MX Snapshot first creates the snapshot as temp files, which it then compresses as a source to write out a bootable ISO.
Don't try to squeeze 20 GB of data onto a 16 GB drive: compression isn't magic. Don't ignore the fact that in order to back up your data, you need enough space to both store a copy of the data and store the ISO that gets made from the copy of that data: hence the need for twice the snapshot size in free space just to create it.
The second best advice I could give is "start making backups while you still have room to store one". When your disk is 95% full and you can't bear to lose any of it, you've already missed your window to start exporting your data painlessly. Once you get to that point, you're going to have buy another drive and just start moving files over to it, and that's not something MX Snapshot would be useful at doing.
Thumb drives are cheap, especially the ones 128 GB and smaller. Save yourself the headache and just use a thumb drive big enough to comfortably the data you care about keeping. If you get one big enough you could even put Ventoy on it and maintain a library of different MX snapshot ISOs you create if you keep them around 20 GB each.
