i never knew these existed before

https://www.amazon.com/CineRAID-CR-H238-Enclosure-Duplicator-Compatible/dp/B01M7P1YRJ

says it can clones to a larger capacity drive.

i back up my content folders to usb drives, but in a hd crash, i'd have to reinstall the os and carrara.

cloning sounds better, just swap in the clone? am i high or is this how it really works?

what do you think of those M.2 ssd drives? there's like an M type, looks like you just push it in the slot, then lay it down, secured by a screw

there's ssd drives that plug in like a regular hard drive. sata iii connector.

a 500gb should hold all my content for a while.

M2 ssd drives are usually internal drives if your HD dies cloning can be helpful but not always a perfect guarantee and you have to update the clone regularly to make sure it is as current as possible. Saving your content to an external drive and updating as need be in my opinion is a better route granted having to reinstall carrara and then mapping the content once Carrara is installed as tiresome as it maybe has less likely hood of things getting messed up if you clone your drive. I say this because when you clone a drive any potential errors on your harddrive are also included when you clone the drive so bad sectors or disk errors will be included in your clone. Again this is just my opinion I have all my Daz and Carrara content on a drive all by itself and have a back up on a external that I store separately and update it when ever I install new content and if I have to reinstall Daz Studio or Carrara even Poser then I just map to my content drive and am back up in running with minimal hassle.

on my PC I ran freefilesync, and just sync'd to an external drive (I actually sync'd two drives to it) yes I would have to reinstall windows and apps, but if I restore the DIM stuff to all the same locations it should go forward, and the Carrara preferences (or just copy the whole directory back). On my Mac I switched to I have TimeMachine which makes a snapshot every 30 mins or an hours and in the event of a crash HD or a complete change of machines just tell it I have that when doing the install and it takes care of it. I know windows has some tools but I haven't played with them.

"Casper creates a complete copy of your Windows system drive, including the operating system, applications, photos, music, email, documents, calendar, preferences, settings and more — without ever leaving Windows." I always get two identical hard drives on my machines, so that Casper works seamlessly. It also works with external drives like USB, I think. It has saved me more than a few times. (Casper is a pun on the old "Ghost" program from Norton ... Caper the friendly Ghost)

https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/

Backing up to disk images can work as well. High capacity drives like 4 or 5Tb are pretty economical and can store multiple images.

A few years back now but I do remember a computer that was sold in PC World it was for Video work the front of the case had slots and you could put drives in a hot swap and just slide it in and out this allowed all you're current work to be saved on to a drive then this drive could be removed and put some where safe I my self had a computer that used a large enclose to keep my self up and running. Now days I use a mate to back up my system drive on to an USB drive it works for me.

i couldn't resist it, ordered the cloner

it works!!