An illustrative “Live Synchronization” feature creates and maintains a ready standby “synchronized application” that is available to take over as a failover solution for a “primary” application that operates in a production environment, but will do so on a different computing platform (e.g., physical server, virtual machine, container, etc.), and possibly on a differed kind of computing platform than, the primary. The illustrative system has specialized features and components for discovering and singling out each primary application and identifying and locating its disk image, e.g., VMDK file. The application is Live Synched to the standby/failover application without reference to whether and how other co-resident applications might be treated. The standby/failover destination supporting the synchronized application may be located anywhere, whether in the same data center as the primary or geographically remote or in a private or public cloud setting.