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Can I place both a clone and a backup on the same external drive?

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I would like to create both a clone and a backup of my laptop to an external usb drive. I created two partitions on the external drive thinking I could put the clone on one and the backup on the other. However, when I try to create the clone (as is) it wants to erase the partitions I created on the external drive. I can then create the clone and am left with an unallocated space. I can partition and use this unallocated space for the backup but the next time I wanted to create a new clone it would erase this area. Is there a better way to handle this?

Thx for your help,
Frank

True Image 13
Windows 7

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Just do full disk mode backups. There would be no advantage in cloning to a partition, even if you could.

If you did clone one disk onto another in the same machine, as soon as you booted up, Windows would mark one disk and only one disk as a boot disk and only one as a system disk. If you're lucky it would mark the same disk as boot and system disk but not necessarily -- I've seen it happen. Win won't tolerate two Boot/Sys disks in one machine. So as soon as you booted after cloning, you will have defeated your purpose.

So clone to a removable drive if you must. Although disk backups are more versatile (you can move them form disk to disk, restore only some partitions if you want, etc.) and you can usually fit many of them onto a disk -- with cloning you get only one image per disk.

A clone is faster to get you up and running again but you backup relatively frequently and restore very rarely.

Got it. I've taken your and Tuttle's advice and am just doing the full backups. Thx for the response.