Mario, John
Thank you for the input.

Acronis looks like an interesting product as it lets add things to existing image backup. As I read about it, seems to do the job right., but what got me a little suspicious is some reviews stating that new version is trying to push cloud based backup, even if you install local version. I am not a big fan of companies that push subscription based products.

My setup is fairly simple. I use a laptop with fast, 500gb Opal nmve SSD and a very small factor USB 3 flash drive that I use to backup personal items that stays plugged in. Initially I thought of just getting a cheap 500gb 7200 drive and make a system image and just re-write whole image from time to time, still backing up personal music files to flash as extra guard. But the other issue is, if internal hard drive fails, I would have to buy same one (m.2 one sided form factor) that sits in my laptop to replace it... And the whole idea behind image or clone backup is that if (hopefully not) main drive fails.

One of the solutions I came up that can possibly work is getting a large, 1TB internal drive that will fit my laptop. Partition it in two halves. Clone my existing drive to 1 partition and swap drives. In this scenario, I will have internal drive with what I have now, plus second equal partition that I can use as just space for something.

Now the trick is to find a way to have new drive active partition to sync to my old drive, to make them same... So in case something happens, in theory, I will just swap the drives and whole thing should start right up, without actually "unpacking" stuff and using proprietary software. I am wondering if SyncToy from Microsoft will do the job if I connect old drive via external enclosure to sync with new "active" drive?

Thank you.