Clone means clone

Clearly Acorns does not understand what "clone" means. On my Mac, I use CarbonCopy Cloner to clone the internal HDD to a USB-connected external HDD. This is a bit-for-bit duplication of the internal HDD to the external. When I boot the system, I can select the external USB-connected HDD as the boot device, and the system boots right up, the environment is identical to my internal HDD environment, and I am secure in the knowledge that if the internal HDD fails I can be back up in 3 minutes by taking the external HDD out of the drawer, plugging it in and rebooting. Why can I not do this on Windows 8.1? I downloaded a Trial Edition of ATI 2015, and the first warning is that cloning is disabled. How do I know if I want to buy the product if I can't try the primary feature I'm interested in. Then I start reading the forums, and find that "cloning" in Windows does not mean "cloning" as I understand it -- creating a bit-for-bit replica of the drive, in a bootable state, for recovering the system if something goes wrong with the internal drive. Instead I am directed to make an "image backup", and create recovery media, and then when something goes wrong I should buy a new drive, put in place of the failed one, boot from recovery media, and do a full restore. How long will that take? Hours? All day? What good is the UEFI BIOS if it is not able to boot from external HDD media? How is this an improvement over the old BIOS? On the Mac (and other modern hardware), having an EFI pre-boot environment provides powerful alternatives. Once again, I find Windows, even the latest version (8.1) sorely lacking in capability. Why should I pay $40 plus for ATI when there are free alternatives which can do a recoverable backup? The PC came with a "One-Key Recovery" program, if that was what I wanted. What I wanted is the ability to create a true bootable replica of the existing system disk, period. It appears that sadly it is not possible to create one in the current state of Windows.

Mark Almeida