The internal drive is a 128GB SSD. The used space is 35.7GB. So I tried to backup the SSD on a 64GB USB Drive. But I get the error message "This drive is not a valid backup location".

I thought for sure that a 64BG USB drive would be sufficient for a used space of 35.7GB. But then I read someplace that the USB drive must be large enough to accommodate the empty space on the SSD. This means that my flash drive must be the same size or larger than my SSD drive, which is 128GB.

Is that true, or am I doing something wrong? Thanks in advance.

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I would say that it is true and a USB drive of the same size may not even be enough. As I think I brought up in another thread I was trying to image my Surface to an external hard drive and it would fail due to not enough space. The Surface drive is 128 GB with ~42 GB used. The external partition was set at 200 GB. I didn't bother with redoing the external to 300 GB going straight to 400 GB. The issue went away.

To be honest I have no idea as to why this was but it was. It seems to possibly have something to do with Shadow Protect or Shadow Copy. I can't remember which but it was one of those two that was in progress when I'd get the error.

If I might suggest you may be better off getting a small (500 GB) external hard drive as it would probably cost less that a flash drive of that kind of size. You could possibly go with 256 GB but remember that my Surface failed with 200 GB. If you do go with an external hard drive a 2.5 inch form factor would still be small. I would also suggest that the external be self powered as tablets don't have a lot of power to spare.

<edit>
I did a bit of a search on Amazon and found several 2.5 inch 500 GB externals for under $40.00 but not much self powered. They would probably work but I would still worry about available power supplied by the tablet... Probably work but can't say for fact. If I went in that direction I'd be looking for lower power consumption in the specs.

As a note I only had the not enough space issue with the Windows built in imaging. Acronis was fine.

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I presently use a 512 Gig drive to make an image of my 1 TB drive but it only has 200 some of data. I use a external drive bay to image too, it may be an issue with the location being a USB drive.

Hi David,
From what I've seen the built in Windows imaging is the only one with this size quirk. I don't anymore but I used to also use Macrium and didn't see this issue there either. It also does not exist in Acronis. I do and will continue to use the Windows built in imaging just due to being able to do an image without booting to other media... remember I don't actually have Acronis installed.

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