Robert in CA wrote:
I'm confused with what were attempting to do.

I noted the various sizes of the backups as well
but I followed your instructions you first gave me
to the letter (I have all them saved as screenshots)
and they all went smoothly. I usually make the comments
you refer to whenever I create a system restore point but I
will make it a point to add them to the Mrimgs from now on.

So which mrimg from the 8500 do you think is best to clone?
I assume that is going to be our first step. I went back to take
a look at the 8500 Mrimgs and all the recent mrimgs are about
the same size. The changes occur on early Mrimgs that I kept
'just in case' and that's the explanation of the difference in sizes.

I'm not understanding exactly what you want me to do with
the 780? Do I use the Rescue CD or System Repair CD? Or
are you saying we need to clone a new OS onto the 780 before
any of this works? In any case I want to do the 780 before the
8500.

Here are the mrimgs for the 780 and they all are around
the same size.

https://postimg.cc/sM16GLvv

The encryption problem went away on it's own . I don't see the icon
anymore. Maybe it was just during the process that it occurs?

We can download 7Zip once we get everything back working normally.


Thoughts/suggestions?
Robert

Main Drive (C: and System Reserved) - does drive have malware?
- a problem correctable by restore?

New drive (C: and System Reserved) - needs an OS if just for the purposes
of emergency booting and repairs

I thought those were the two classes of problems you're interested in.

*******

Generally, for the Main Drive, if the OS develops a problem, you
restore using the most recent backup. This is intended to reduce to
a minimum, the amount of "lost materials" from a Downloads folder.

If you restore the Main Drive, you have ot take precautions not to lose
any valuable files for which you don't currently have copies.

*******

The New Drives, the emergency boot could really use any version.
If you know that one of the older versions doesn't have a Backspace Key
issue, then maybe that's the file to use. Of the newer images you've
got (you seem to be taking the images once a month), it's hard to
say which of those doesn't have the Backspace Key problem.

If you install the old backup, then relatively soon when that
New Drive is booted, both the Dell Updater, the NVidia Updater,
and Windows Update are going to be working to fill the machine
with recent stuff. In which case, if any of those caused the
Backspace Key problem, the problem would soon return (just on
the New Drive).

The difference between the drives, is your Main Drive is a
daily driver and has data content. The Emergency OS on the
New Drive, does not have quite the same requirements.

You can see in this picture of the world, that keeping data
files on C: is a bit of a mistake, but the options for moving
the storage off C: are not 100% free of issues. People in the
newsgroups here do that, they move their personal storage off
C: or move their Program Files off C: and onto another partition.
I don't particularly recommend that - it just makes extra work
at times. Work that I personally can do without. My Program Files
stays on C: . But any large collection of personal files, I move
those off manually to bring down the total size of C: . I have not
undertaken to do that automatically, only manually, so I can
watch what is going on.

Paul