Bootable backup for Windows (7) - Like Super Duper for Mac

Question

Just got an SSD installed on my notebook and as people suggested I want have my bases covered in case it fails and I expect it to fail.

Here is what I have in mind... keep a partition on the main drive (HDD) the same size as the SSD and keep a "clone" there, and in case the SSD fails... I take the SSD out and boot from the clone partition. From my understanding SuperDuper! does just that for MacOS, but I don't seem to find a something similar.

I've found a lot of great tools out there that enables you to make bootable images (CloneZilla, DriveImage XML, Acronis® True Image™ to name a few), that is not what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

In theory most update software will do that - you just need to pick disk to disk mode, rather than disk to image mode. I'm quite sure that clonezilla does (assuming you don't mind making a full backup each time) -as i'm not sure if anything does incremental or differencial disk to disk backups.

Alternatively once you have done the initial duplication, you could use a file level backup software of some sort - rsync and unison come to mind, to keep the two installs synced.

Answer 2

Try XXCLONE - in my experience it does for Windows almost the exact same thing as SuperDuper! does on the Mac, though SD's interface is much prettier. It's a file-based disk-to-disk copy, instead of copying the disk sector by sector, and it creates a fully self-bootable cloned drive, not an image. XXCLONE has a free version to make full backups. The paid versions offer additional features, like incremental backups, scheduled updates, etc - similar model as SuperDuper.

FYI, when I was researching this product, I found some forum threads around the internet complaining of issues with booting on Windows 7, but they seemed to be from a few years back. I had no issues booting Windows 7 from a full backup I created this morning (21/Feb/2012) using the free version. I don't plan to purchase the paid version, because I don't need the extra features, I just needed a one-time clone. XXCLONE did the trick!