Can't I just clone a drive for backup?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
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Here's the question that I got.
What would seem to me to be a fairly ideal
way to back up would be to have a second hard drive on my computer and daily
the drive would update to remain a mirror image of Drive C, fully bootable, etc.
I think the main thing I would need, in addition to the second drive,
of course, is a software program that does this.
Is there such software that you would and could recommend?
Yeah, indeed, there are some very good solutions for this scenario.
I will differ with you, however, in this concept of ideal.
While it is absolutely a useful technique
for some scenarios, I do not consider it an ideal scenario for most users.
Here's what's being described.
Basically, in your computer there's a hard disk and you want to back it up.
The approach that's being proposed is
to get essentially a second hard drive that is close to identical to the first.
Then, using software, mirror, literally mirror or clone the entire
contents of the drive that's in use to this second drive.
It would have to be a complete clone,
the boot sector, all the partitions, everything.
The concept then is that if something happens to your primary drive,
you open the machine, you swap the cables, and you're back in business because
that second drive was basically there ready to take its place.
Now, in terms of software to do this, actually, there are several.
Most of the good backup programs that I often talk about here,
including the two that I actually recommend, Macrium Reflect
and ECIS to do will both allow you to make clones of one drive to another.
There's also a software called
Clones Zillow, which, as its name implies, focuses on this scenario.
All of those will work.
All of those are good solutions.
And if this is a path you want to go down, that's the path I would send you.
However, I would not actually have you do this.
Instead, I would have you do the more
traditional scenario that I've been recommending for years.
And that is simply have an external drive.
It could be whatever drive you want
to get, bigger the better, usually, but just an external drive.
Use backup software, again, like Macrium Reflect or Easeus to do,
and create what's called an image backup of the machine.
That is, in fact, everything that's on the hard drive.
It contains everything that the clone does.
Except rather than mirroring it to a dedicated drive,
the image is actually contained in a file that you can copy to the external drive.
In fact, you can have multiple copies.
You can have multiple backups on your external drive.
With a clone, as described,
you've dedicated this drive to have one and only one copy of your backup.
It is the most recent copy.
If you do this every night, it's whatever happened last night.
The issue is then that if you don't find out that you need something like a deleted
file or that you got malware for a few days, it's too late.
Your clone was overwritten overnight.
If you're doing image backups,
especially if you're doing, say, monthly full images with nightly
incremental images, then not only does that take up less
space, you can have them all on this external drive,
but you can also then go back to any time within the last month or however long you
end up keeping these things to get whatever it is you're missing or
to restore to your machine as it was at any given day in the past.
The trade off is actually pretty clear.
On one hand, with a clone, you have a dedicated drive that would have
only the single backup, and it's internal, and it's an internal drive that needs
to be roughly the same as the original drive.
The advantage, of course,
is that replacement or restoration is much quicker.
You open the machine, you swap the cables, and you are up and running again.
If that's important, then maybe a clone is for you.
Nine times out of ten,
it's not that important that you'd be up within minutes.
An hour or two is plenty.
And that's where the image comes in.
If your system dies, if your hard disk dies,
then you boot from your backup software's recovery media
and you simply restore the image backup that's on your external drive.
It's the same thing.
It just takes a little bit longer.
It has all the same information.
You just have more opportunities to go back further in the past.
You have this random external drive that can be whatever you like,
you can copy your backup images anywhere you want for long term storage,
for additional security, whatever makes sense for you.
So while you can do exactly what you're describing, I advise you don't.
I advise you go to a traditional image
backup route for much more flexibility when the time comes.
Hope that's helpful.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
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thanks for watching.