I'm looking for a program that will completely clone the c drive on to another hard drive automatically. So, if something happens I can use the cloned hard drive as a boot drive. If I can have the program set to clone the hard drive maybe once a week? What would everyone recommend?
Best software to automatically clone harddrive?
- Thread starter xillyllix
- Start date
Solution
- Mar 16, 2013
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My personal favorite is Macrium Reflect.
But it seems you are looking for an Image, and not necessarily a 'clone'.
A clone operation will do what you seek, but there are other options in that same tool.
Macrium will do that clone on a schedule (weekly?), or do a full drive image, and then Incremental or Differential images daily.
All depends on your personal needs.
There are also other applicatins that do this. Casper, Acronis TrueImage. I prefer Macrium, because I know it works.
Personally, I am not a fan of having 2 individual drives with viable bootable identical OS's. If there is any small problem in the boot order, or simply a failed SATA cable...you might boot into the 'other' drive, and not even know it.
We can go into more detail if you wish.
I'm a big fan of having a clone of the boot drive but I totally share USAFRet's uneasiness about booting up a computer with 2 identical OS's attached (particularly if that OS is windows). In my opinion, that is asking for trouble.
I think you would be better served to have the backup drive in an external usb enclosure and clone to it manually at whatever schedule you see fit. That's what I do anyway and it's bailed me out on several occasions. It takes less than an hour to make a clone. But ... I never, ever boot my computer with the clone attached.
I use the free version of EaseUS but I'm sure the others are good too.
I think you would be better served to have the backup drive in an external usb enclosure and clone to it manually at whatever schedule you see fit. That's what I do anyway and it's bailed me out on several occasions. It takes less than an hour to make a clone. But ... I never, ever boot my computer with the clone attached.
I use the free version of EaseUS but I'm sure the others are good too.
- Mar 16, 2013
- 171,776
- 18,136
- 184,590
You're making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Drive images is a better solution.
Instead of a single "clone" that consumes a whole drive, you can store days or weeks of 'versions' in pretty much the same space.
My C drive is currently 183GB consumed space.
A Macrium Reflect Image, and 14 days worth of Incremental updates consumes 212GB.
With that, I can recreate the system as it was on any day in the last two weeks.
And that also leaves the rest of that target drive available for whatever I choose. Rather than a full clone.
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