When a businesses’ server(s) go down, if they’re smart, & have good disaster recovery measures in place, they’ll very soon be up and running again – if they don’t, it’s actually not unheard of for the business to fold. I’ve seen regular Windows users voice the same sort of concern – how can I very quickly and easily get my PC/laptop running again when something breaks – and after seeing something like that in the comments with AweClone [given away yesterday], I thought it might be helpful to write about a few options. The keywords here are *fast* and *easy* -- IOW taking less time than restoring an image backup &/or troubleshooting & fixing things, which can be done later if needed.
When the GOTD is a cloning app, or an image backup app that has cloning capabilities, people sometimes talk about having a 2nd, cloned [identical] hard drive that they can just swap into place when Windows or other software breaks. This is basically what many businesses do, but in the cloud and using VMs [Virtual Machines] that can be synced as often as every so many seconds. Swapping your PC’s hard drive with a cloned drive will work, but it’s only practical, and fast, if you can pull one drive out, and plug in another without opening the PC’s case. And that requires a special case, or a hot swap adapter that fits into an external drive bay, where a DVD drive for example would normally go. There are also some laptops that let you quickly & easily swap hard drives.
The weakness in that scenario is that the cloned drive is only up to date at the time that you cloned it, though that can be mitigated by saving anything new to another drive &/or the cloud. Why not have the cloned drive in the PC’s case? Won’t work… well, it will, but you’ll need to do a bit of work to change some IDs, and you may need a 2nd Windows license if the copy on one of the drives deactivates -- and you’ll have to do that each time you clone the 2nd drive to be current with the drive you’re using.
blogs.technet.microsoft[.]com/markrussinovich/2011/11/06/fixing-disk-signature-collisions/
Possibly easier, and definitely cheaper is to add a 2nd copy of Windows to your PC or laptop – if one breaks, you simply reboot/restart, and selected the 2nd copy from the boot menu. If you already have a copy of Windows 10 activated on the PC/laptop, a 2nd copy will probably self-activate. While this method will get you up and running in however long it takes for Windows to start up using your PC or laptop, unlike using a cloned drive, you’ll have to install any software you want to use in that 2nd copy. If you just want the basics to keep on using the PC or laptop, and will say, restore an image backup for your main copy of Windows later, that’s not too bad. And restoring that backup will likely be much faster & easier using that 2nd copy of Windows rather than booting to a USB stick. But a 2nd copy of Windows on the same drive won’t help much if the hard drive fails…
I think with most PCs, and some laptops, you can add a 2nd hard drive. Instead of adding a new partition to the existing drive to hold that 2nd copy of Windows, you can put it on a 2nd hard drive, and that protects you in case that original drive fails. In this case you’d want to install that 2nd copy of Windows separately – you might have to unplug the existing hard drive while performing the install – so that 2nd drive would have its own boot files… Back in your original copy of Windows, use EasyBCD to add that 2nd copy of Windows to the boot menu. Otherwise, if that original hard drive failed, you’d have a 2nd copy of Windows, but no way to start it. However, if that 1st drive fails, you’ll still need to tell the BIOS to use the boot files on that 2nd drive, either in the BIOS settings, or if your PC/laptop has a boot order menu you can activate with a hot key when it’s starting.
If you want to emulate *somewhat* the method a business might use with duplicate VMs, that's possible too if you have 2 copies of Windows installed. It works with the VM(s) located on a separate drive or partition, using the same drive letter in both copies of Windows, and I’ve only tested it, can only confirm it works using VirtualBox. You’ll need to install VirtualBox in both copies of Windows, setting up the VM in your primary copy. Then you’ll need to copy the C:\Users\[UserName]\.VirtualBox\ folder from that 1st copy of Windows to the 2nd. [Note: the path to that folder may be different -- just copy it to the same place in the 2nd copy of Windows as it is in the 1st.] It’s also easier if you use the same account or username in each copy of Windows, or else you’ll have to edit xml configuration files in that folder to use a different username in the file paths. Now you can start the very same VM in either copy of Windows, and since it’s the same VM, any and all changes you made while in the 1st copy of Windows are there when you start the VM in the 2nd.
The disadvantages of using this method are the disadvantages of using a VM. Basically you’re running 2 copies of Windows at the same time, the Host and the Guest, so you won’t have use of the full resources your PC or laptop has to offer, and you won’t have graphics hardware support, though in many [most?] cases that won’t really matter much. The copy of Windows used for the VM [which needs its own license BTW] is stored on a VHD [Virtual Hard Disk], which is a single file that should be copied somewhere else as a backup. To restore that VHD, equivalent to restoring an image backup, copy/paste that copy of the VHD in place of the file you were using. So, if one copy of Windows breaks, start the 2nd and fire up that VM. If the VM breaks, replace the VHD with a copy of the backup VHD. You can also have multiple copies of the same VHD in the same folder using slightly different names, e.g. 1_WindowsVM.vdi, 2_WindowsVM.vdi etc. – then if the VM broke, rename a couple of files and start up a fresh copy [similar to what some businesses do with on-premises servers & VMs], and you’re good to go in just a couple or few minutes.
Everything so far assumes the PC or laptop itself still works – what if it doesn’t? If you used the 1st option discussed, a swappable hard drive, if it were running Windows 10 it would *probably* work fine plugged into another PC or laptop, although it would take longer the 1st time Windows was started as Windows 10 searched Microsoft’s database for needed drivers. It could work plugged in internally or using a USB drive dock or hard drive case, if the new PC or laptop was able to boot the same way, EFI or Legacy, as the now broken device. And a VM created on one PC or laptop will work on another. A caveat of both situations, using a swappable drive or a VM, is that Windows may deactivate – at the least it will probably count against the number of hardware changes allowed before Windows deactivates. With Windows 10 on a drive [not as a VM] it may count against a copy of Windows 10 installed on the new device you’re using.
As a last option you can use a Windows 10, Windows To Go drive – a full version of Windows 10 without recovery options, that cannot be upgraded to a new version of Windows 10, but is set up on a MBR drive for maximum compatibility, booting in either EFI or Legacy mode. Using an SSD in a USB 3.0 – 3.1 housing, performance should be close to using an internal conventional hard drive. It’ll have all your stuff, and your copy of Windows 10 will work plugged into most PCs & laptops. Since only one drive is used at a time to start Windows, it's fully cloneable without worrying about IDs – housings are often less than $10 on sale, and most let you swap drives in a couple of minutes without tools. You will need a Windows PC or laptop, a copy of the free Rufus app, and a Windows 10 ISO to create a Windows To Go drive on a connected USB hard drive. And what I said in the last paragraph about deactivation does apply.