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Cloning 2 hard drives

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Hi,

I'm a little confused about cloning and copying, and which is the best way to achieve what I want.

I'm trying to clone my whole computer to an external HDD to guard against any catastrophic event such as HDD failure or a ransomware attack. The problem is, that I have two hard drives, a 120GB SSD with the operating system (Windows 10) and a 1TB hard drive for programs, and from what I can make out, I can only clone one of them.  From that, it seems that I should clone the system disk, and copy the programs disk.  Would that be correct thinking, or am I missing something.

Any help would be appreciated, Thanks

OzBoz

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Create full disk backups instead.

I am not a fan of cloning. Cloning is an "all or nothing" process. If something goes wrong, the user may end up with two unbootable drives and loss of data. Backup and recovery is a far safer method, and allows for multiple tries if the user is unfamiliar. Plus, you can save many full system images to a single external drive, versus only one clone. Cloning has no advantage over full backup and restore, except a slight time saving at the expense of considerably more risk and complexity.

Clone should be used only by advanced users who know what they are doing. It is riskier and can result in a loss of data and a failed system. Create a full disk mode backup and restore it, using the bootable Rescue Media, to the target disk, as it's far safer and simpler.

Thank you tuttle for a very quick response.  Your comments were helpful and sorted that out for me.  I was confused because I'm sure I read somewhere in help, that certain important information was not included in a backup, which was included in Cloning, and would cause problems.  So, I'll go with the full disk backups.  Thanks again.

OzBoz

 

Do you recall where you read that? It's not correct.

OzBoz,

I would recommend that you create your full disk backups (for both drives) using the bootable recovery media.  This will insure that all your user settings will be retained in the backup such as any browser settings and previously created Windows restore points among a few other things which are by default excluded from a backup when using the Windows installed True Image application.  Such data is not necessary for a restore of a disk image to be successful but can cause some inconvenience for the user.