Hi fellow audiosexers,

I want to know if it's possible to do a clone of a bootable drive, store it to a cloud service and reverse clone to a new drive from cloud.

If it's not clear I'll explain it in simple words:

say, I have my primary drive and I want to "upload" a clone of that drive to a cloud service, so that if it fails I can use another working computer to access the cloud and reverse clone the bootable drive stored in the cloud to a new drive and when the reverse cloning is finished, disconnect the new cloned drive and connect it to the old computer and just boot as nothing happened.

Is it possible? I don't want to discuss the opportunity of doing it for privacy reasons or other matters, I just want to know if it's possible and how.

Thanks in advance for your answers

 

I rarely had to clone a failing drive, but I do have a backup routine which can be used for that same purpose since the process is, basically, the same.
I go about it by creating an image of my system drive with the Acronis (I use the boot disk version of it and run it from my USB stick) and then I upload that image to my MEGA cloud account (which can then be downloaded and recovered at any time).
The only problem is that, depending on your system, these drive images can be quite big in size (mine is 150GB) so uploading/downloading them can take a while.
The usual process for restoring that image (whether to recover a backup or clone a drive) is to download it onto an external USB drive with another PC and then restore it from there to the original PC, again with the Acronis boot disk software.
Saved my experimental ass numerous times.

 

Hi, thanks for your answer, I got a fast fiber connection so UL and especially DL times ar not much of a problem. I already have my important audio projects folders synced with google drive so for daily tasks I'm covered.
I want to do this like 4/5 times a year so that in case of failure I don't have to reinstall from scratch or reinstall many programs etc... This solution seems valid: is it 100% idiot-proof?
Is there a way to know if the image created on the cloud is not corrupted or anything that could result in that image not able to be restored?

 

Not sure if it's 100% idiot proof, but I've never had problems so far and I've been using it for years.
Acronis has an inbuilt image validation feature (it checks it upon creation, but that option must be selected before you start) and I assume MEGA has some kind of basic hash check validation for uploaded files too. But I feel that with a fast, solid internet connection there should be no problems anyway.

Alternative cloud service: Pcloud
Switzerland-based, reliable.

 

You could also split the image into multiple archives and then you should be fine because the file integrity is confirmed by the archiver (Rar, Zip etc) during unpacking. Easier to upload too.

 

Acronis is expensive, yes, but you can download a pirated bootable CD image with torrents and mount it on a spare USB stick with Rufus, removing the need to actually install it on your system.

 

I see, thanks. Didn't know they offer that service too.

Btw bootable CD mounted on a stick works fine here, just get a slightly older version.
There are some convenient all-in-one releases available out there, with Disk Director, True Image and some handy tools all on one bootable release.

 

Thanks DAWinci and Saint. Pcloud offer seems promising, with unlimited file size upload and lifetime offers. Do I have to worry about having warez in my system image when choosing a cloud provider? Can/should I encrypt the image file in some way?

 

As far as I know, no, you're good.

I have a warez software library folder on my cloud account and no one ever said anything.
I think that, at least officially, your files are private.

 

its faster,safer and smarter to simply buy another hard drive (yes hard drive not ssd) and do your backups to it over usb3. if the cloud is down, or you internet is down, or the cloud provider goes tits up, etc are all things you have no control over, and hence to access to your "backup".

Store backups locally or with a friend if you are living with an arsonist..

They are not expensive toshiba 2tb, currently 70$ usually on sale periodically and holidays for around 55$

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BQX6NNVC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Yes you can do that. There are fully blown windows PE bootimages out there, that are full of imaging software and network drivers.
Google for NHV Extreme, I use the version from 2023, but there is a newer one.
You can build stuff like that yourself, but its time consuming.
(There was a script, PE Builder as far as I remember... Don't, just don't. make musik, not bootdisks)
After writing it to a Stick with rufus you create an image with one of the tools (like partition magic or part wizard or whatever), login to your favorite cloud service and upload it. You might need an extrernal drive as a temp drive (image -> temp drive -> cloud and cloud -> image -> tempdrive -> system drive).
BUT: You already need that usb stick for booting and writing your image...
why not have a 256gig usb stick with the image of your system drive... making that cloud thing unnecessarily complicating things.
I don't know of any technology (or mainboard that is) that is able to boot from a cloud image to aviod the usb stick for good.
Local network, yes, but cloud, not that I know.

 

a toshiba 2.5 usb hard drives takes up no more space than a pack of cigarettes when traveling.
nothing is 100% safe in the data redundancy field, there is an an incremental price paid past a reasonable level of safety. as we become more paranoid or insecure we add more layers, and more layers, at more cost, and more cost.

like a perfect airplane, a perfect backup doesn't exist, but good enough is usually good enough, most of the time.
if the OP is just concerned about backing up his operating system in an easily restorable form a handful of 64gb usb drives would give him multiple chances, takes up little space, is easy to verify, create, and restore with the proper software. Macrium Reflect is a very good utility for creating disk images for restoration as well as bootable restoration medium

nothing is perfect, if you really need it, spread your risk by using multiple strategies, but remember each additional strategy requires time, and resources and understanding, and so should be weighed against the amount of gain these additional strategies gives one.

 

Hi guys and thanks for your answers, I will give you a slightly more detailed description of my situation just so that you can better contextualize my question.

I use this system (now on win 11) since many many years and I use it 95% for audio production, so in these years I installed many many vsts etc... and I don't want to redo it from scratch in case of a failure of my primary disk.

I already do 3/4 times a year 2 identical "backups" in 2 different disks (one not in my home, in case of a natural disaster, fire etc...(I live in a sismic zone) but I want to add another layer of protection using a cloud service, hence my question.

I don't need a proper backup of the entire system drive always online and synced because I already use a cloud service with synced folders plus an always connected drive where I backup all my projects daily (so there's a main projects drive + this backup drive always connected)so I was just asking if it was possible to do a system clone, store it in the cloud so that in case of a disaster I could, as a last chance, retrieve my precious files from there.

Thanks again for your answers, much appreciated

 

Hi guys, I just made a 1 year subscription 2TB to pCloud. I have extremely slow upload speed at the moment like 2/3 MB/s where my connection should do 70/80 MB/s in upload (tested). I wrote a mail to customer service for that and I'm waiting for a reply.

My question now is: how can I do a proper system image, a one that if I restore from that I will have an exact copy of my current system. I did one from within Win 11:

control panel/backup and restore (windows 7)/create a system image.

Is this right? I have a program called disk genius from where I successfully cloned my system to another physical drive and booted from there so that went well, maybe I could use that program to do a proper system image if the win method I already tried it 's not the right one?

Now I have to go out to work and I will come back tonight at home so I couldn't test anything because I don't have time, I thought that i could ask here just to be sure I'm not missing anything(like possible problems when recovering from a disk image instead of using a system clone or anything that I can't think of).

Thanks in advance for your answers guys