Mark Twain wrote:
Here's what I'm up to; following your advise,
I'm trying to take advantage of the availability
of good quality HD's while still available.
Especially since all new computers, even the
refurbished models come with Windows 10 so I'm
trying to stock up while I can to keep the 8500
up and running and on Win 7 Professional.

It's not a matter of upgrading in size or running
out of space, 2TB suits me fine, (In fact I have 788
GB of free space on my 1TB on the 8500) It's a case of
maintaining what I have.

I just thought why not have a second back-up for
the WD (Mrimgs) because if I loose that drive I loose
all my Mrimgs. So I could just copy the Mrimg folder from
one drive to another and then continue from that point.
and/or I could just buy the HD's and leave them in their
boxes.

At present I have (2) spare cloned HD's for the 8500.
My thought was to buy a total of (3) more HD's, (1) for
the WD(Mrimg) backup and (2) for spare cloned HD's for the 780
that I'll all put back in their boxes after cloning except the
WD backup for Mrimgs.

Thoughts/Suggestions?
Robert

If you're doing a disk-to-disk file copy, you can
do that from file explorer. You don't have to do all
file operations as clones. Copying is OK once in a while,
and definitely makes sense when copying the backup you make
tomorrow, from one external drive to a second external drive.

If you want all the drives to be bootable in an
emergency, then you can clone the part that boots.
(In Disk Management, you see the words "System", "Boot", "Active",
marking the things you want to clone to make the disk
bootable).

So I suppose the answer is yes, you can use Cloning
as the first step, but when new backups are added to one
drive, you can just copy the MRIMG file to a second drive.

Paul