Back up clone second drive

My laptop has two hard drives, one holds the operating system the other one holds all my work things (photography) so im looking to back up this drive to an external drive and keep it up to date with weekly updates, so what is the best way to do this?

Any good backup software can make a disk backup image. I do suggest you image both disks so if your OS ever has a problem you can restore it quickly.
Poll on Backup software
I'm a Macrium user myself. Scroll down to "Backup at Home". Click on Reflect 8 Free.
Instructions here.

glasskuter said:

Any good backup software can make a disk backup image. I do suggest you image both disks so if your OS ever has a problem you can restore it quickly.
Poll on Backup software
I'm a Macrium user myself. Scroll down to "Backup at Home". Click on Reflect 8 Free.

Macrium Reflect Free Trials

Macrium Reflect - Incredibly powerful software that allows you to create and schedule effective backups

www.macrium.com

Instructions here.

Macrium Reflect Quick Start - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

knowledgebase.macrium.com

Click to expand...

I agree, but in order to back up two drives, you need a third drive and best recommendation is to use an external usb drive.

Another approach useful for critical data is to use a cloud service. I do not usually advocate using cloud services to back up non critical data e.g. videos that can be easily redownloaded.

In my opinion Onedrive is the best one to use because of its files on demand feature. I also get Office 365 and 1 TB of space (and as I have family pack, each user (max 6) gets 1 TB each.

glasskuter said:

Any good backup software can make a disk backup image. I do suggest you image both disks so if your OS ever has a problem you can restore it quickly.
Poll on Backup software
I'm a Macrium user myself. Scroll down to "Backup at Home". Click on Reflect 8 Free.

Macrium Reflect Free Trials

Macrium Reflect - Incredibly powerful software that allows you to create and schedule effective backups

www.macrium.com

Instructions here.

Macrium Reflect Quick Start - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

knowledgebase.macrium.com

Click to expand...

Thank for your reply, i back up the C drive to an external M.2 drive and also the other drive with all my photography things to another external M.2 drive

I just do a simple Copy of data to be saved to an External USB drive mainly so I can plug that drive into a different computer and work with the files, don't have to install any program on other computers to read into a backup. My experience with backups goes back to '92 and my 80386/40MHz computer with a Colorado Memory parallel port tape drive and DOS.

cereberus said:

I agree, but in order to back up two drives, you need a third drive and best recommendation is to use an external usb drive.

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Why can't you backup disk 0 to a partition on disk 1, and backup disk 1 to a partition on disk 0?

NavyLCDR said:

Why can't you backup disk 0 to a partition on disk 1, and backup disk 1 to a partition on disk 0?

Click to expand...

Of course that is possible. Of course if device gets fried....

cereberus said:

Of course that is possible. Of course if device gets fried....

Click to expand...

Both hard drives would have to fry as well. Of course the safest backup is one that is stored completely off the premises of where the computer is used/stored.

Karen's Replicator
SyncBackFree
Macrium Reflect (image, don't clone !!!)
AOMEI Backupper (image, don't clone !!!)

All above are freeware

Choice of backup depends on what format you want the backed up file(s) - as a single backup file (restoration will be backup program dependent) or native format (backup a .jpg as a .jpg, etc)

In respect of this latter option, command line programs such as Robocopy (again, free) are excellent ... and fast !!!!

All can be scheduled with their own built-in scheduler and/or Windows Task Scheduler.

NavyLCDR said:

Both hard drives would have to fry as well. Of course the safest backup is one that is stored completely off the premises of where the computer is used/stored.

Click to expand...

I have seen a case where a power surge fried both drives but admittedly years ago. I would imagine designs are more resilient now.

Of course, the bigger risk of keeping backups as you described is online hackers ransoming drive, or corrupting them in someway.

Re. offsite storage, I take view I use cloud for critical files (includes installation codes).

Everything else is replaceable ultimately.

I rather take view, my main issue would be laptop theft (flood unlikely, but fire is a risk of course).

Overall, I consider a separate usb basckup drive is adequate as a hacker cannot touch it whilst offline.

As I see you need to copy the updated files only every week, if you are using Robocopy ,all you should need to do is rerun the robocopy command with the same parameters. Robocopy will copy over any new, missing, or changed files.

The /mir switch will cause robocopy to delete any files existing in the destination that are not in the source.

If you need to copy the changes only automatically every week without having to copy the while folder again, just try tools like Goodsyn and Gs Richcopy 360.

idgat said:

Karen's Replicator
SyncBackFree
Macrium Reflect (image, don't clone !!!)
AOMEI Backupper (image, don't clone !!!)

All above are freeware

Choice of backup depends on what format you want the backed up file(s) - as a single backup file (restoration will be backup program dependent) or native format (backup a .jpg as a .jpg, etc)

In respect of this latter option, command line programs such as Robocopy (again, free) are excellent ... and fast !!!!

All can be scheduled with their own built-in scheduler and/or Windows Task Scheduler.

Click to expand...

Why is image better than clone?