Re: cloning, imaging, and backing up
- From: "Jo-Anne Naples" <naples@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 10:33:11 -0500
Thank you, Tim! This is the clearest explanation of cloning versus imaging
that I've seen and answers my question about the differences in the programs
as well.
Jo-Anne
"Timothy Daniels" <NoSpam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23orF3tgxIHA.1768@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Jo-Anne Naples" wrote:
I use Windows XP, SP3, on a 5-year-old Dell desktop computer
with USB2 ports and a 60GB hard drive. I'm about to buy an
external hard drive (or maybe two of them) for backing up,
Or you can install another internal hard drive.
Or you can install a mobile rack if you have a spare
expansion bay, and you can put bootable clones
or images on it (them). Here is a manufacturer of
mobile racks that has a large product line:
http://kingwin.com/ide.asp (assuming that you have
IDE hard drives and not SATA).
I'm confused about whether there's a difference between cloning
and imaging.
The utility writers' terminology varies a lot, but for the purposes
of this NG, a clone is an exact sector-for-sector copy to another
hard drive, and it is directly bootable. An image is a *file* that
contains all the information necessary to re-create the original.
Acronis's True Image does both, but the clone will be of an entire
hard drive, and it cannot make clones of individual partitions.
Acronis's Disk Director 10 *can* make clones of individual
partitions. As a matter of personal taste, though, I prefer Casper 4.0,
which can make clones of individual partitions, and it does it
quickly because it doesn't bother cloning sectors that are empty.
Casper 4.0 also doesn't require one to disconnect the hard drive
that contains the original OS when one starts up the clone for its
first run.
I'd like to be able to boot from the backup and/or copy it to a new
internal hard drive or a messed-up but functional old one
so I can seamlessly start working again, without having to reload
programs and redo my personal settings.
The fastest up-and-running-again backup is the clone. It already
resides on a hard drive in bootable form. If that hard drive is another
internal hard drive, all you have to do is to restart the PC, and go into
the BIOS and put the backup hard drive at the head of the hard drive
boot sequence (some BIOSes instead allow just "enabling" one of the
hard drives as the "boot drive"). As the boot drive, the drive containing
the clone will boot up the OS as long as the OS's partition is marked
"active" and its boot.ini file points to the right partition.
* Be able to do regular incremental backups as well.
* Be able to copy individual folders or files from the external drive to
the internal one if I simply screw up something rather than crash
completely.
So...does any single program do all of what I want? I've been looking at
Acronis True Image and Casper 4 (at the suggestion of someone on one of
the newsgroups); years ago I had Ghost but never actually used it.
I don't believe Casper does images, but it does incremental cloning
that greatly reduces the cloning time after the initial clone is made.
*TimDaniels*
.
- References:
- cloning, imaging, and backing up
- From: Jo-Anne Naples
- Re: cloning, imaging, and backing up
- From: Timothy Daniels
- cloning, imaging, and backing up
- Prev by Date: Re: cloning, imaging, and backing up
- Next by Date: Re: 'safely remove hardware' problem
- Previous by thread: Re: cloning, imaging, and backing up
- Next by thread: Re: cloning, imaging, and backing up
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
