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Backup of System drive.
I hope this is the right forum for this question which is to do with backing up Windows 10.
I have recently purchased a new laptop which came with Windows 8 and a 1TB hard drive which I partitioned into two - one for the OS (Drive C) and the other for data (Drive F). The reason for this was because I have 2 external drives which are both 500GB and the partitioning made backup easier.
I upgraded the OS to windows 10 as a 'clean install'.
Now I am looking at how to backup the OS.
In the past I used a product called Casper
The reason I used this is because once the initial 'clone' of the C: partition was done, it was a quick job to update it periodically using a feature (they call Smartclone) which only updated certain system files and any changed files on the drive.
I have an external drive which I use to backup the data from F:
A bootable USB drive with Casper on it allows me to boot to the USB, load Casper and then copy the Backup onto a new C: drive should anything go wrong and/or if I needed to change the hard drive,
BUT ALSO
the facility where I could just take the backup drive and use it as a replacement for the main OS drive and it will only be out of date by the amount of time since I did the last 'Smartclone'
Simple - until now.
Within Casper the options only offer the facility to copy the whole hard drive (both partitions) or one partition at a time.
- I do not want to copy the whole drive each time because that will take up a whole 1TB drive unnecessarily. I guess I could back up the Windows OS, the EFI Partition and recovery partitions as 3 seperate actions (I guess the later 2 should never need to be backed up subsequent to the intial backup).
But I have 2 problems:
1. Casper does not see the EFI and recovery partitions on any disc other than the OS one.
2. It appears that Windows does not allow the creation of these 2 partitions except on a 'format' during a clean install.
Because of these problems it does seem that this backup software is not as simple as it used to be.
Can anyone suggest any alternative method to achieve what I need - ie a quick and easy way to keep a copy of the Win 10 OS on an external drive that is a plug and play replacement.