What is a free program for duplicating a hard drive under win?

Question

Backup

There is a computer with windows 7.
There is a 1TB hard drive with 2 partitions. One with Windows, the second with files.
Also, to whom is an external hard drive connected to 1TB.
What is a free program that can schedule (at night) to completely duplicate an internal hard drive to an external one?
I tried the built-in tools, but the backup never ends. Either some kind of error, then the place ends (you can only save one backup), then something else. In general, this is only an image, but I would like a duplicate.
Making an external hard one mirror is not an option, because. I read that it is not recommended to do this for the system partition.
This is understandable - files are created and deleted on the system partition much more often than on a simple data partition.
In general, the goal is to be able to quickly restore the backup if the main hard drive fails.
A complete duplicate of the disk is an ideal solution - just rearrange the bios to boot from an external hard drive.
Windows backup is a bit worse because you have to do a restore for a while. But as I already wrote - it does not work.

Answer 1

And if so:
With any cloning utility, we make a full copy to an external drive.
Then we set up GoodSync or Cobian Backup to fully synchronize non-service partitions from working to external according to the schedule at the file system level (file-by-file).
Service partitions rarely change (?), And what the OS writes will be synchronized with accuracy, because both softwares are able to remove shadow copies.
Zero guarantees; what can go wrong in a critical situation is another question. As an experiment, you can try, but in production I would not do this.
Ideally, you need mirroring through RAID1.

Answer 2

Solutions from paragon cope well with a similar task. It is possible to create not only a backup, but also a virtual disk based on a real working system. those. P2V conversion. This, of course, from under the launch of the OS itself, you do not need to go anywhere and reboot.
This particular solution https://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

Answer 3

What exactly do you want to do?
If you need a backup copy, then this can be done in particular using wbadmin .

Making an external hard one mirror is not an option, because. I read that it is not recommended to do this for the system partition.

So do you need a backup copy or a raid?
And why is it not recommended to do a system partition raid? Who cares?

Answer 4

And than RAID 1 did not please you??