In a 2016 reddit thread entitled Clone a Win95 machine while still running?, the consensus was that it could not be done (though rasfert mentioned using xcopy).
Kan Yabumoto's XXCOPY includes a purpose-built clone operation (as described in his Cloning the Win9x system disk using XXCOPY) which can image a running Windows 95 system as simply as:
XXCOPY C:\ D:\ /CLONE
Before booting the clone, set its primary partition as active/bootable. The usual method (also outlined by Kan) is to start the computer via a bootable floppy or CD and run FDISK from there, as Microsoft's FDISK does not allow marking a partition active on any drive other than 1 ("Only partitions on Drive 1 can be made active."). However, Ranish Parition Manager does not suffer from this artificial limitation, and can thus be used to mark the primary partition as active from within Windows.
The last version of XXCOPY compatible with Windows 95, 2.96.7, can be downloaded from http://www.xxcopy.com/download/xxfw2967.zip.
/windows | Jul 21, 2019