Clone vs Back-Up? Why not always clone to 2nd drive?
Acronis 2020 on Thinkpad with 2 ssd drives. I would like to know if cloning my main drive (c:) to my second drive (d:) regularly is a good and safe practice? If my c: drive fails I just clone back from d: to c: using a USB with Acronis recovery. It seems to be faster and easier than using backups incremental back ups etc.
I am a teacher with loads of documents and I clone on a regular weekly basis.
Thanks and feedback is very appreciated


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Yes, I always clone disk 0 to disk 1, but the cloned drive is not visible. If I disconnect the first drive windows 10 does boot from the second drive. I read somewhere that Acronis does this as you cannot have 2 bootable drives. I don’t really understand how this works but it does.
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I've been cloning my system drives for years. I copy from C: to E:, then use the target drive as my new main drive. This lets me know if there's been a problem in cloning, as there sometimes is. If I have a catastrophic problem with the main drive I can simply and easily switch over to the clone: ie. the old main drive.
Used various software - including Acronis until it stopped creating bootable drives. I'm now using another clone package. As it happens I have both system drives up and visible as I write this, and have done for several days. No problems at all in booting. The motherboard - a Gigabyte - remembers which drive was drive C: the last time and uses that.
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Rene Wittmer wrote:Yes, I always clone disk 0 to disk 1, but the cloned drive is not visible. If I disconnect the first drive windows 10 does boot from the second drive. I read somewhere that Acronis does this as you cannot have 2 bootable drives. I don’t really understand how this works but it does.
It is not Acronis that does this. It is as I understand it done by Windows.
As both drives have the same disk signature it can get very confused. If you have a UEFI system, the boot device is Windows Boot Manager (which can get well and truly confused), if you use older BIOS approach, you select the dive that the computer will boot from.
Ian
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The Backup operation of Acronis software creates an image file for backup and disaster recovery purposes, while the Disk Clone tool simply copies/moves the entire contents of one hard disk drive to another. You can save this image to any supported storage device and use it as a backup or for disaster recovery purposes.
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Clone does not move any data from the source drive, it duplicates that data to the target drive leaving the source drive intact.
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