anyone upgraded to Windows 10!

[stratosboy]

My computer boffin advised me this week to get a 16mb memory stick to make a recovery back up of Windows 10 on each of my computers - as from July 2016 the free upgrade stops and if a computer crashes and hard drive is lost you would then have to buy Windows 10 to be able to retrieve everything back again.

[Bibs]

I think he meant 16GB, you'll struggle to fit a single DSLR pic on a 16MB one! That said, I just checked and my Windows folder alone is 18.3GB. I'm not aware that you can download the W10 install exe separately either.

I back my PCs up to a local NAS drive, could do that to avoid this problem. 

[Vulcan Grey]

You can download it as an .ISO file and save that on a DVD or USB stick so you can install Windows 10 later.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

 

[gregs24]

Having a recovery disk isn't a bad idea but 16Gb is unlikely to be big enough. If you have upgraded to Windows 10 via the free digital rights upgrade then the hardware hash for the computer is registered with Microsoft activation servers. If your HDD fails you can do a clean install on a new HDD from the downloaded ISO of the same version of Windows 10 as before and it will reactivate automatically as long as you have the same core hardware (motherboard mainly). You will not need to buy a fresh version of Windows.

I think you need a new computer boffin who knows a bit more about Windows activation !