Hello and thank you for reading,
I have 4 Windows 10 desktops that I'd like to clone for Disaster Recovery. If I restore these clones it may not be on like hardware.
I'm looking for simple inexpensive recommendations. I am familiar with GHOST but I am not up to date on modern cloning solutions.
Thanks!
Jonathan
Hello jonkeo and welcome to TF,
This is what most of us here use:
Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect
I would make a backup image of the disks to an external storage device. You can at a future date restore the images to new drives.
Alternatively you can clone the drives now to backup drives.
I would suggest making a bootable Macrium Reflect USB Rescue drive too.
Clonining is for creating a backup drive that can be swapped for original drive e.g. if original drive fails.
Image backups are slightly different. In essence it is like a clone except all the files are stored in a single datafile (rather like a zip file).
However with an image backup, you cannot hotswap drive with backup. You need to use a bootable usb drive to decompress backup file and write to original or new drive.
The main reason for using an image backup is it takes less space AND you can have multiple versions at different points in time on backup drive.
Most of us use image backups as it is more flexible than a cloned drive.
Depending on internet speed, some users also copy the image file to cloud e.g. to onedrive as an added security.
If you use Macrium Reflect Free to create image, you can actually open the image as a virtual machine using virtualbox or Hyper-V.
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