mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

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heartwood
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mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by heartwood »

I've spent over an hour so far googling on the internet and within the BH site to get some advice on which I want to do. I'm looking for a simple "mirror" or "clone" answer. All the answers seem too detailed for me. I need a KISS answer.

I've been postponing installing the W10 Creators update. Now i want to do a backup for the current installation, install the update, but be able to roll back to the current install if something goes fishy. Which will let me simply roll back to the current state?

I've got a 1.5TB external drive and Macrium software.

Thanks!
jebmke
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by jebmke »

That should be all you need. I use Macrium and make periodic images of my machine -- especially prior to installing new software.

Make sure you have created a rescue disk with Macrium on it so you can boot Macrium to restore the image if needed. Macrium will usually prompt you to do this - it is a process that Macrium performs.
Don't trust me, look it up. https://www.irs.gov/forms-instructions-and-publications
BHUser27
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by BHUser27 »

I'm not sure "mirror" applies to your situation. I think you either want to "clone" or create a backup "image" of your entire system. To me, "mirroring" is when you have copies of a file or folder in more than one location and you want them to stay in sync (like with Google Drive or One Drive).

You can use the built-in tool in Win-10 to do a full "System Image Backup". Then if you do not like things after Creator, you can roll the entire system back to the state it was when you created the backup image.

There is good info on this page. Skip down to the section "System Image Backups" if you want...
https://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-to ... ery-tools/
smackboy1
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by smackboy1 »

heartwood wrote:I've spent over an hour so far googling on the internet and within the BH site to get some advice on which I want to do. I'm looking for a simple "mirror" or "clone" answer. All the answers seem too detailed for me. I need a KISS answer.

I've been postponing installing the W10 Creators update. Now i want to do a backup for the current installation, install the update, but be able to roll back to the current install if something goes fishy. Which will let me simply roll back to the current state?
I think you've got the nomenclature a bit confused, which is why you're not having much success finding a simple answer.

No matter what you do, have a full backup of all your data. This is always good advice in case the update does awry or any other disaster strikes. Any MS update should automatically create a system restore point, but it pays to be diligent.

Make sure you have bootable rescue media in case your PC won't boot after the update e.g. USB or optical disk.

You have 2 simple solutions that are performed BEFORE the update:
1) Create a System Restore Point. This will allow you to restore the system to the previous state.
2) Create a Custom System Recovery Image. Windows creates an image of the partition which can be used to restore the partition in case of a mishap.

Mirroring is when you create a mirror image of a drive partition for redundant data storage using multiple HDDs e.g. RAID 1.

Cloning is when you create an exact copy of a HDD on another hard drive e.g. when replacing an old HDD with a new one.
Disclaimer: nothing written here should be taken as legal advice, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
ourbrooks
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by ourbrooks »

From the Start menu, go to Settings/Backup and select Backup and Restore (Windows 7).
Connect an external HDD with enough space to hold all of the space you've used on your disk.
Select Create a system image and select your HDD
When it asks, create a recovery drive using a USB stick.
Put the hard drive and the USB stick somewhere where you won't accidentally use them again.

If things really go badly on the upgrade, set the BIOS to boot off of the USB drive. Boot from it and it'll let you reload the image from HDD.

Read up on mounting a VHD. You can mount the image as an external drive and read stuff off of it, so you can use it to restore individual files as well as restoring the whole image. In fact, I keep an HDD image in a fire safe to use for onsite backup.
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whaleknives
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by whaleknives »

BHUser27 wrote:. . . Skip down to the section "System Image Backups" . . .
https://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-to ... ery-tools/
ourbrooks wrote:. . . Select 'Create a system image' . . .
:thumbsup for creating a system image. If you'd like to look at illustrations, see "How to create an image backup in Windows 10 and restore it, if need be".
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ResearchMed
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by ResearchMed »

BHUser27 wrote:I'm not sure "mirror" applies to your situation. I think you either want to "clone" or create a backup "image" of your entire system. To me, "mirroring" is when you have copies of a file or folder in more than one location and you want them to stay in sync (like with Google Drive or One Drive).

You can use the built-in tool in Win-10 to do a full "System Image Backup". Then if you do not like things after Creator, you can roll the entire system back to the state it was when you created the backup image.

There is good info on this page. Skip down to the section "System Image Backups" if you want...
https://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-to ... ery-tools/
I noticed this indicates one can restore on a different computer.
I thought this wasn't doable (by civilians, anyway) due to anti-pirating concerns.

And is the cloud version identical to the physical drive version?

Thanks.

ADDED: Can this also be used as a regular backup, or is it system level only?

RM
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ourbrooks
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by ourbrooks »

ResearchMed wrote:
BHUser27 wrote:I'm not sure "mirror" applies to your situation. I think you either want to "clone" or create a backup "image" of your entire system. To me, "mirroring" is when you have copies of a file or folder in more than one location and you want them to stay in sync (like with Google Drive or One Drive).

You can use the built-in tool in Win-10 to do a full "System Image Backup". Then if you do not like things after Creator, you can roll the entire system back to the state it was when you created the backup image.

There is good info on this page. Skip down to the section "System Image Backups" if you want...
https://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-to ... ery-tools/
I noticed this indicates one can restore on a different computer.
I thought this wasn't doable (by civilians, anyway) due to anti-pirating concerns.

And is the cloud version identical to the physical drive version?

Thanks.

ADDED: Can this also be used as a regular backup, or is it system level only?

RM
Actually, PC computers don't have a unique identification so Microsoft can't tell with complete certainty that the image has been restored to a different computer. What they do do is record several different things like the Ethernet address of the adapter(s), information about the hard drive, etc. As long as n out of m factors match, they presume it's the same computer. This can cause problems if there are things like virtual Ethernet adapters such as the ones from VMWare and these get changed between backup and restore. I don't think a mismatch prevents a restore but there may be complaints that you have an unlicensed version of Windows.

If you're talking about System Image Backups, they're usually done to external hard drives. Uploading all 250 Gigabytes to the cloud takes a very long time.

The image backup backs up everything on the hard disk, including the operating system and all of the files of all of the users. The rescue disk/thumb drive restore doesn't let you choose specific files, but there's a trick. You can mount the backup as a VHD (Virtual Hard Drive). It shows up as drive K: or whatever. You can then copy off of it like any other drive. You can do the VHD trick from any computer to which you can connect the hard drive.

The other drawback is that each image holds just one version of a file. If you want a file history backup, either use the built-n file backup or use a commercial service which also provide offsite backup such as Carbonite.
jebmke
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by jebmke »

If you generalize an image you can load it to almost any PC but if you leave the license key in the image it can cause problems. I normally delete the key, generalize the image, then load it to another piece of hardware. The generalized image will load all the drivers (mostly) that it needs to work on the new hardware. OEM keys might not work in different hardware but MAK keys certainly will.
Don't trust me, look it up. https://www.irs.gov/forms-instructions-and-publications
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heartwood
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by heartwood »

Thanks to all.

I used the W10 backup & restore option, saved a system image to my external drive and then did the Creators Update. All seems to have gone as intended.

MS Money still works! As an aside I like the updated Edge browser now that it allows for extensions, esp LastPass.

My next task is a creating a recovery drive on a USB stick. I passed on doing it thinking "I don't have a CD drive". Thanks for suggesting the solution w/o my even asking the question.
dadu007
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Re: mirror or clone my windows 10 HD?

Post by dadu007 »

Another vote for Macrium for backing up/restoring OS drives. There's a reason there are third party software offerings for this task.
The real test comes when you actually NEED to restore a previous image of a drive.
#not_a_Microsoft_specialty
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