Can I make multiple mirror images on a single hard drive?

Question

I'd like to be able to restore a computer, should the hard drive fail (has happened to me 3 times in 18 years). I think I could do this via a mirror of the current hard drive; and I could keep that on an external hard drive (my "vault") until needed.
I have multiple computers, so I'd like to have multiple mirrors. Could these be maintained on the same "vault"? I suspect they could, within different partitions. But could they also be maintained in separate folders, or does it need to be separate partitions?
And... is there another way to do same thing besides a mirror? I've never used a restore disk (because I've never done a good job of planning ahead). Would this work as well? And if so, could I store multiple "restore disks" on an external hard drive, same questions about the partitioning.

thanks for your help and regards

Answer 1

It's good to see someone setting up a backup!



Windows has a couple built in back up systems that are pretty easy to use.



The old Windows 7 system still works in Windows 10, it's the one that can do system backups so you can keep the main system running.



The other tool is called File History, which records changes in files and can restore files that are damaged.



Right now I've got an internal drive for my file history backup, and I've got a NAS for the system backup for 3 different computers. I'm currently using SyncBackFree, though it's mostly for keeping copies of files on a 2nd place.



I used to use a RAID Mirror, but it's only useful for drive failure, if something like a virus deletes the files without me noticing the RAID doesn't do anything to protect against that. My latest motherboard doesn't support RAIDs, and Microsoft's support for RAIDs is terrible, so I gave up on using that for a backup system.

Answer 2

A mirror is usually used to describe a 2nd copy of any drive that is IDENTICAL to a source drive and stays IDENTICAL in REAL TIME. thus a mirror is usually handled by firmware on the mainboard of the pc ie RAID. you can periodically CLONE a drive which is what most people actually need, ie. a version of their drive just after they completed installing everything they want and without any JUNK yet. having a constant mirror handled with SOFTWARE is simply not a good idea. RAID mirroring relies upon all disks in the array having 100% good sectors. RAID is all you really need and maybe a few cloned images using acronis/easus/paragon to name but a few.

Answer 3

You could but each mirror would quickly become outdated, so after a few weeks if you restored a mirror you would still have to restore updates and any files that weren’t backed up would be lost. Better to use a backup software that will do an initial full backup and then incremental backup every day or so. That advantage of this is that the incremental backup only backs up changed or additional files making it much quicker than the initial backup (which can take an hour or so). The software is clever enough to use the initial backup and the incremental backup to restore at any point in time. Something like acronis works well and is not expensive. It also compresses the backup so it uses less space. With acronis you can have several different backups of different machines in separate folders or drives, given the limits of storage capacity. A mirror is an identical copy so will occupy a considerable amount of space.

Answer 4

Technically could you take multiple mirrors - yes! You may (some might think bizzarely) be breaching copyright! If you mirrors are saved to files you can keep them all in the root directory if you wan, all you need is to name them in such as ways as you can differentiate them!