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Following on from this question: Installing Windows 10 (same product key) on a separate drive in case primary drive fails (multi-boot), I have a 237GB SSD C: drive (almost full, nearly 4 years old) with Windows 10. I have a 1.8TB magnetic drive (D:), currently unused and empty. I want to mirror the C: drive to the D: drive, so if the C: drive blows up, I don't have downtime as I go through a restore process. How do I do this (using Windows 10 or otherwise)? Can I do it by creating a partition on the 1.8TB D: drive so I 'm not wasting all that space? (C: drive is only 237GB.)

Obviously backups are already in place.

Edit: This is not a duplicate of my linked question. They are about completely different things. That question was about installing, not mirroring, Windows 10 on another drive on the same machine using the same product key, which is what I prefer to do. Still waiting for an answer there, please have a crack, I'd really like to know how to do it, and have a bunch of related questions about it. This question is about mirroring an existing C: drive to a second drive (using Windows 10 tools or otherwise), because that was suggested in an answer to the first question, although it didn't actually answer the question.

nmit026
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You are using terminology that isn't consistent with the way the industry uses them.

You specifically said in a comment,

I want to "mirror" the C: drive to the D: drive, so if the C: drive fails, there's no downtime.

You can't have "no downtime" in the case of a hard drive failure if you don't use RAID. That is exactly what it does and what it is used for.

Now, if your question is how to implement RAID. You can do so with some motherboards in the BIOS, an add-on hardware RAID controller, or you can use dynamic disks in Windows. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.windowscentral.com/how-set-mirrored-volume-file-redundancy-windows-10%3Famp

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1125623

Other than that, you have no other options for "no downtime."

If you can accept some down time, then either find a backup product that does a full disk backup periodically to the other drive that you can restore in the event of a failure, or find one of those same backup products that can do a disk clone from one drive to the other.

Your best bet is to just maintain a full system backup that can be restored in the event of a failure. This can often be scheduled and kept up to date automatically. Otherwise, with the clone option you'll probably be stuck booting a disk and cloning manually every so often.

On a final note, installing Windows 10 to another drive with the same product key to be used as some kind of backup in case of failure - makes absolutely no sense. So, I'm not even going to entertain the idea. Half the battle is asking the right question.

Appleoddity
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