Sorry, CD, but I think I'm about to give up. This unspeakably hopeless site keeps dumping my lengthy postings with some sort of authentication bovine excrement, and I keep forgetting to copy my efforts first.
The "Recovey" bit is what's needed to recover the operating system and all the additional rubbish/trial programs etc useful additional software provided by the manufacturer. It should never change and never be written to. At a pinch, it is what enables you to return your computer to its factory state, software-wise. I would include it in any image.
On the subject of images vs clones - an image will only take up as much space on your external drive as the amount of stuff contained in it - eg your 72GB on the C partition plus the 10GB used on the Recovery partition - all shrunk a little by the compression algorithm. You can keep lots of images on your external drive.
As I recall it, the procedure is simple enough. Plug your external drive into the computer. Create a folder on it which you'll find easily in future and name it appropriately - "W7 Image March 2017" or whatever.
Make sure you've gone for Macrium's imaging option. Make sure you've actually selected all the partitions on your source drive (the one you're imaging.)
When it asks for a destination, use the dropdown thingy to navigate to the folder you've created, and tell it to put the image there.
Let it call it whatever it likes, and create whatever files it likes for future use.
Somewhere along the line, it should summarise what you've told it to do. If you're happy, click "Finish" or whatever it is. It might need to sit and think for a while, but should eventually present you with progress bars showing what's going on (I've always kept half an eye on it rather than telling it to shut down on completion and then ignoring it.)
If it offers the option to verify the image, I would go for that.
When it suggests making a rescue disk, go for it - I think that link I gave earlier covered this. (???) You'll need the rescue disk to unpack the image to a new hard drive should the present drive go bang, so it's pretty important.
It seems an awful lot of fuss, but it's amazing how relaxed we tend to be about things like how we're going to recover if a hard drive decides to let go. Personally, I think it's well worth the effort.
I think I know what you're saying about being a user, but I suspect that even as users we need to keep quite an arsenal of weapons against mass destruction of our data, not to mention expensive operating systems.
QUick note - I see reli's added some really good stuff there, too. Now let's see whether it lets me post this.
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