Haven't seen this subject brought up and figured i'd throw my 2 cents of experience out.
I clone my OS drive (always have) every 7-10 days for a number of reasons but mainly to avoid the time cost and aggravation of when a bad malware/trojan/virus takes over the computer. Have only had 4 or 5 events like that in 10-12 years, but when it happens, the first few times i'd spend 3-6 hours diagnosing the culprit on majorgeek.com, and half of those times i ended up doing a fresh install. Problem is it takes 11-12 hours to do a complete fresh install on my system - hell windows alone with all the updates takes a few hours on it's own. EaseUS ToDo Backup clones the drive in 250-30 minutes (quicker if i'm not using sector by sector, and clones it back even faster, so it was a no brainer, a clone copy was the easiest way to eradicate any major malware invasion.
Anyway, I've been running a samsung xp941 mounted in an addonics PCIe > M.2 card as my OS drive, and have been cloning it to a old samsung 810 (dell computer OEM SSD) on a sata port. Even though i'd partitioned the samsung 810 as GPT, i worried there would be an issue getting the clone copy to clone back to the xp941 and work correctly.
This morning i had an issue with the xp941 and the MBR partition as well as the System Recovery partition both disappeared when i attemted to resize two of the partitions on the drive. When i went to simply clone just those partitions, one at a time, using EaseUS it wouldn't complete the clone, giving me an error msg to the effect "cannot clone to an empty partition" - wtf??
So after trying a number of workarounds with no success, i finally decided to go ahead and try cloning the entire drive back - this time i got an error msg that EaseUS couldn't clone to a "dynamic GPT partition" and to create a "WIN PE emergency disk" - basically a more powerful clone disk that you create in EaseUS's tools section.
Using it i was able to clone the disk, but i still had to use the windows installation disk to get the drive to boot, even though i had selected "sector by sector" for the clone.
all told, i spent about 4 hours today correcting this drive corruption
anyone have any insights on what might have been a better choice or something i could have done that would have made it smoother/easier etc? I can't state i'm that computer literate - this was my first DIY computer, and at the age of 65 yrs old.
tks in advance
I clone my OS drive (always have) every 7-10 days for a number of reasons but mainly to avoid the time cost and aggravation of when a bad malware/trojan/virus takes over the computer. Have only had 4 or 5 events like that in 10-12 years, but when it happens, the first few times i'd spend 3-6 hours diagnosing the culprit on majorgeek.com, and half of those times i ended up doing a fresh install. Problem is it takes 11-12 hours to do a complete fresh install on my system - hell windows alone with all the updates takes a few hours on it's own. EaseUS ToDo Backup clones the drive in 250-30 minutes (quicker if i'm not using sector by sector, and clones it back even faster, so it was a no brainer, a clone copy was the easiest way to eradicate any major malware invasion.
Anyway, I've been running a samsung xp941 mounted in an addonics PCIe > M.2 card as my OS drive, and have been cloning it to a old samsung 810 (dell computer OEM SSD) on a sata port. Even though i'd partitioned the samsung 810 as GPT, i worried there would be an issue getting the clone copy to clone back to the xp941 and work correctly.
This morning i had an issue with the xp941 and the MBR partition as well as the System Recovery partition both disappeared when i attemted to resize two of the partitions on the drive. When i went to simply clone just those partitions, one at a time, using EaseUS it wouldn't complete the clone, giving me an error msg to the effect "cannot clone to an empty partition" - wtf??
So after trying a number of workarounds with no success, i finally decided to go ahead and try cloning the entire drive back - this time i got an error msg that EaseUS couldn't clone to a "dynamic GPT partition" and to create a "WIN PE emergency disk" - basically a more powerful clone disk that you create in EaseUS's tools section.
Using it i was able to clone the disk, but i still had to use the windows installation disk to get the drive to boot, even though i had selected "sector by sector" for the clone.
all told, i spent about 4 hours today correcting this drive corruption
anyone have any insights on what might have been a better choice or something i could have done that would have made it smoother/easier etc? I can't state i'm that computer literate - this was my first DIY computer, and at the age of 65 yrs old.
tks in advance
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