When you clone the hard drive that contains your operating system and applications you could save yourself from some serious heartache. When your master hard drive goes down so does all of your settings, preferences, software application keys and more. To get yourself back in action if you have a current clone drive you remove the downed hard drive. Replace it and clone your drive information in to the new hard drive. May take an hour or so verses literally months without it if you have to start from scratch.
You’ll need software and hard drives to create a clone drive. Here’s a blog post with more detailed how-to information.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
An alternative to this for Windows is to use software to take an image and write it to another source, along with create a boot stick. Macrium Reflect for instance can do this on a scheduled basis. I write my backup to my Drobo which has lots of space. It also creates the boot flash disk for me. If my C: drive should fail, I replace the drive, boot from flash and Macrium can then restore from the Drobo (or any external USB drive) to the new disk. Back up in just a couple of hours. This is a lot… Read more »
Bob,
Is it possible to back up to an external drive and then boot from the EXTERNAL?
Assuming you’re using SATA drives possibly. I don’t know if it would work with M.2 drives. But in this case you would be doing a clone, not a backup. Backups are compressed, and can do iterations; they need to be expanded to a targeted resource.