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Can I send a image to my external HDD dock instead of cloning?

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Hi

( I hope I have worded the correctly) basically instead of cloning a hard drive can I just do a image restore to the external hard drive in my USB dock?

.From what I have been reading cloning a hdd its always not the best way.

So I'm asking can I restore a image to my external USB hdd dock?

If so it would save a lot of moving around as I have the PC in a desk, so crawling around etc would save me a lot of pain.

Tia

 

Btw my pc is a Dell XPS 8700 desktop 

 

 

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Yes, you can do a recovery of your Win 7 OS backup image to a HDD connected via a USB Hub or Dock, but after doing so, do not try booting into Windows with that HDD still connected, so that you do not cause a disk signature clash by having the original source drive and the HDD both connected and having the same disk signature.

Wow that just made my day.

 

Thank you for the help

Last question I tried doing that by restarting w/ boot disc>recovery> partition ( not files)>chose my C: drive> send to> USB and let it run and failed. I tried this twice with no luck. It did run for hours and failed both times the cloned drive was empty?

 

So next I restarted using the boot disc choose clone and that worked fine. I have yet to check that with the cloned in my PC as like i mentioned I'm crawling around moving a large desk to get that the  pc.

 

I did check the size and number of files between the C and the cloned drive and they are both the same. Is it possible to validate the clone somehow without physically installing it in my pc?

I did check the size and number of files between the C and the cloned drive and they are both the same. Is it possible to validate the clone somehow without physically installing it in my pc?

Not that I am aware of other than by swapping in the cloned drive and booting from it.