...A lot of us in the forums use Macrium Reflect to do this. For
informational & site links, see this post/thread.
I'll look into that, too.
Right now, however, I use Clonezilla to image copy my two hard drives to other identical hard drives I store "elsewhere". First power down the PC completely, insert backup drive into Thermaltake external SATA dock, power that up, then power up the PC with the Clonezilla CD/DVD in; a USB memory module would boot as well. When Clonezilla comes up it's a simple matter to image copy the entire source hard drive to the external hard drive. When done the external hard drive is identical to the internal hard drive. Power down, rinse and repeat for the other internal hard drive.
Why do it this way? (1) the images are exact thus the backup drives can simply be substituted for the internal drives in case of drive failure (just did that with one of my relatively ancient drives), (2) the copies can be stored anywhere NOT colocated with the source drives, thus are somewhat "safer" as backups, and (3) the copies are stored on nonpowered inactive hard drives so there is NO wear-n-tear on them; even if the source drive fails the copy of it will be on a robust little-used hard drive.
During this Windows 10 fiasco, I made good use of a late July image of C: to restore my internal C: drive repeatedly (using Clonezilla in "the other direction" to restore)...then finally to actually physically replace the internal C: drive.
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The failed drive was built in August 2011 and probably bought shortly after that so lasted about 3.75 years. The drive was typically powered up in the morning and shut down at night, maybe 16 hours per day typical, 365 days a year. 16x365x3.75 or 20,000+ hours of use before it started to generate strange messages in Windows' event logs .
Post-post addendum - it's remarkably hard to find totally-meaningful statistics on hard drive lifetimes. If you Google for such a thing you'll get about 4,000,000 hits that ALL reference some stats produced by Backblaze (offline backup company). But those stats are for drives that undoubtedly are little "used" in that they're powered up but mostly inactive - not at ALL like your typical main hard drive on your computer that is being pounded and randomly read/write accessed from the time it's powered up to the time it's powered down.
