Windows 7 How do you update a Hard Drive Clone?

[Tommer]

This is perhaps an advanced question, I'm not really sure where it belongs but I'll ask it here I guess.

I keep hard drive clones (not quite the same as copy/paste) which are made using macrium reflect - I do this so that when an OS drive eventually fails, I can just slot in this clone and be back up and running fairly fast with only a few files to recover rather than the entire computer.

Hard drive clones are great, except, all of the software I have tried has a fatal flaw; They require you to format the cloned drive, before you can make a new clone. The problem here arises in the fact that, between the time the hard drive is formatted and the time the new data is written to the cloned drive, there is no 'clone', so if my computer decides that of all times to die it'll die now (which sods law dictates would happen) then I am left with only a half-complete clone and a dead harddrive.

So, what I'd like to do ideally, is be able to 'update' my clone, in such a way that it doesn't format the data that is already on there, but updates where nessacary, so if it fails halfway through at worst I just have a couple of corrupt files. Does anyone know of any software that can acheive this?

 

[InfoCentral]

OK, I went to Fry's and purchased a new HD on sale for $44. I formatted and installed it. I told Paragon to restore it using my previous drive image. It started but errored. I noticed that Windows made 2 partitions but the main partition said it was still unformatted. So I decided the best course of action would be to have Windows do a full install. I then opened up Paragon and selected it to do a restore again. It asked me which partition to restore too. But the image has 2 different partitions. I didn't want to restore both to the same partition. At this point I assumed that the restore wasn't automatic but I had to manually install each partition one at a time. I thought I would just have to pick the image folder and it would automatically do everything.

So I decided to skip Paragon and retry the Windows image. In Windows I went to the restore section and selected the restore from previous image file. I got a window that said there were none found and for me to locate one. I tried but it would not recognize any drives to select files from. Then I remembered the Windows install disk has the same options. Perhaps I'll try that and see if it works. I put the disk in and rebooted. Selected the restore from previous image file. It found the back up image file right away. I said yes to allow Windows to partition and install as necessary. Bingo! System restored. So my experience tells me that the problems stemmed from trying to restore to a SSD. Lesson learned is to save yourself some cash and use the build in Windows image feature.

 

[Robert Miker]

Thank you so much for sharing about how to update a hard drive clone.