Clone main/boot drive?

[geminorum_alpha]

Is it possible to clone an entire drive (my main/boot in this case)?

In my setup right now I have a M.2 as main boot , plus two SSDs an two HDD just for data storage, with all executables and system files residing on the main m.2 drive.

I'm currently running an old build on win10 (15063) due to some specific software I have to run which is not win10 compatible, and it's working just thanks to a bunch of registry hacks and workarounds  - this has prevented me from updating for a couple of years.

Now other programs I need to work with require a newer win10 build to run correctly, so to finally get to my question: can I safely clone my main m.2 drive, remove all safeties and update win10, and in case something catastrophic happen, pop back the cloned drive and keep working as nothing happened?

 

With the current situation I'd like to avoid weeks of compatibility troubleshooting, or even worse programs not working at all.

[Electronics Wizardy]

I think you want a good backup here, so you can restore if you mess something up. Software like veeam can do this easily.

[azblurbit]

Last time I did this I used Clonezilla. This is essentially a minimalized linux boot drive that automatically runs the dd command for you. Pretty simple and easy. Worth a look.

[homeap5]

Macrium Reflect. But clone offline system (use bootable rescue usb or different pc). You may clone working os too, but that rely on vss which I don't trust, because the only one case my clone was bad was when I decided to try cloning working os. Other people do that without issues though, so maybe that was my bad luck.