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Keeping a cloned drive up to date

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Is it possible to update a cloned boot drive so if it ever was needed my system would be more up to date after a disk crash and swap out.

This would eliminate the need for constant re-cloning.

Perhaps win 10 syncfolder would do it ?

 

Can it be done ?

Graham

1 Users found this helpful

Graham, welcome to these public User Forums.

The simple answer is No!  When you do a clone, it is a duplicate copy of the source disk as it is / was at that specific point in time.  If you repeat the clone operation, it will wipe the target drive as the first action of the clone operation.

If you attempt to sync between an active OS drive to a cloned drive, then the chances are that it will render the clone drive corrupted and unbootable because there will always be files that are locked by the OS that cannot be copied!

Your options are to either do regular backups to a backup drive then restore these to the second (cloned) drive periodically to update it but with the same caveat that recovery will also first wipe the target drive too!

Or setup the second drive as a dual-boot OS drive in your PC, assuming that you can connect 2 such drives internally, then manually update each copy of the OS by booting into it periodically.

One recommendation I would make here is to separate your OS & installed applications from your user data, by having the latter on either another drive or in a separate partition on the OS drive.  This will allow you to maintain different backup schedules for each type of data and make it easier to recover the OS partition without losing any user data.

When I have used dual-boot systems, both the OS systems shared the same copy of user data from a third partition or drive, so maintenance was a matter of keeping the OS & applications up to date, plus keeping regular backups of the user data separate to any backups of the 2 copies of the OS.