I use a StarTech external dual-bay and stand-alone cloner---and never looked back. One of the best hardware investments I ever made. Every now and (regular) then I pop out the (2TB C:) drive, put it in the cloner with the target/clone drive, start it and come back to it about four hours later to a sector-by-sector "pop-me-in-instead" clone. The cloner/bay has USB and eSATA I/O, so it might even provide a faster and more convenient alternative target device for your software cloning programs. It also provides the quickest way to migrate a system drive to a larger-capacity hard drive (you will need something like Partition Master to expand the exactly-cloned original partition to the new drives larger capacity). I now have two of these units. The older unit doesn't work with drives greater than 4TB; the newer unit is tested for cloning up to 10TB (and works with pin-3 power-off "white label" drives). Price-wise, they are comparable---or even less expensive---than some software solutions. Both come with or have an optional adapter for SSDs. I regularly (generally monthly) backup/update 12 HDs and only use the hardware cloning features and Win10 Explorer. Now my data recovery issues usually only involve connecting one of the backup/archive drives, internally or externally---but never dealing with proprietary and file format issues from backup software (maybe even more critical in a RAID setup).

If the software solution works for you---great!

Paj
8^)

P.S.: . . . and, approaching the fourth decade of PC computing, I have only experienced one HD failure and that was for an external USB HD that had a set of files that warned: "Do not delete these files." Of course I managed to somehow do just that and the drive became, in the "other PC" parlance, storagely challenged. However, when I removed the drive from its casing, plugged it into my cloner/bay, I was able to format it anew and it remains fully functionally to this day. I would have to admit to creating most of my previous data issues through operational errors and most of my frustrations from discovering what can't be recovered by software at the worst possible time---when it was needed the most.

Last edited by Paj; 10/01/20 01:32 AM.