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Will this work: clone laptop drive to external HDD to have a swappable HD?

edited February 2018 in AOMEI Products Support

Hi, 

 If I clone my laptop harddrive to an identical 2TB 2.5" drive in an external USB enclosure, is there a way to do incremental or differential backups to that cloned drive? My plan is to have as a second backup a nearly identical drive I can swap in should my laptop drive fail. I suppose I coud do a full clone weekly. The cloning would need to clone 3 partitions on the laptop drive: C:, D: and the small partition with the Windows recovery files. 


The reason is to have an alterate to the backups I'm doing with Aomei and Norton Ghost 15 to a second 1 TB drive in the laptop. Sometimes I find the recovery DVDs don't always run properly. In the situation where I can't restore from a saved image, I would just swap the drives. 


thanks

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Comments

  • The answer to your first question is NO. A clone is copy of your drive and an incremental or diffential backup is only a file that would be added to the drive.

    You could do a DISK clone every week if you feel the need. I've run Ghost 15 for years and done mulitiple restores without any problem. The half dozen or so restores I've tried with Aomei have also worked. All from the recovery CD's I created.

    Just my opinion, but if you feel uncomfortable with the recovery CD/DVD, I'd make 2 or 3 for each program. Surely one has got to work. Test them all. No reason if it works the first time for it not to work again. If you want to feel safe, I'd make a weekly (monthly or whatever) full backup to a portable drive that you can keep separate from your system. That way in case of fire or theft, you will still have a backup set to restore. 

  • Thanks Flyer. I have trying creating different variations on the Aomei recovery disk, using the option to download PE from the web seems to work. Another factor is I suspect I had a bad 8 GB RAM stick which I've since replaced. I can now do an emergencey boot with the latest Aomei recovery disk. I'll make DVD copies of this version that works. In a recovery so much depends on all the parts to work. What would be nice is some kind of RAID arrangement for laptops. I do have a second drive slot and I now have a second 2 TB 2.5" HDD. 

  • On second thought, incremental backups are better. With RAID, if my main HD becomes corrupt, my second drive will be a copy of that corrupt drive. 

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