Re: clone

"Foster" wrote:
To make a backup I use 'Acronis True Image'
(http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).
I create full hard drive image every month and keep it on an
external HDD (you can keep it on another partition), plus every
week I make a differential backup by special scheduler.
So I can restore my system at any time.
Once I tried to clone my HDD to en external drive for the backup,
but it's uncomfortable to switch drives. To my mind it's better to
make simple backup, as it's a really tried method.


It should be made clear that an "image" is a *file* that must
undergo a "restore" procedure to recover the exact copy of
the original partition. It can be compressed, and that is the
advantage of images - it can be put on one or several DVDs
or CDs or on an external USB drive for archiving.

A "clone", OTOH, can be booted immediately. I have my
clones on a hard drive mounted in a removable tray. To boot
any one of the clones on that HD, I just shut down, slip in the
tray, and reboot. I even keep the most recent clone on a 2nd
internal HD, and to boot it, I just restart the system. Having
to have a 2nd HD to hold the clone is not an imposition
because if you have to restore an image due to a crash of
the primary HD, you'll need another HD anyway. I got into this
cloning habit when I was day-trading stocks, and I couldn't
tolerate being down for long due to a disk failure. I even had
2 broadband services - cable and ADSL - which I could switch
in a few seconds.

The advantage of Casper XP over True Image is that Casper
XP can make a clone from a single partition on a HD that
may contain many partitions, and it can put that clone on a
HD that already contains other partitions. True Image can only
make an image of an entire HD and make that image the
*entirety* of the destination HD - good enough for upgrading
to a larger HD, but unable to do anything more complex than that.
OTOH, Casper XP can't do imaging or incremental file backups.
Casper XP is dedicated to just cloning, and for that it does a
good job.

*TimDaniels*
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Backing up the system
    ... >>> IDE disks mounted in a removable trays, and each clone is bootable. ... > and the system partition selection menu to choose ... > clk Disk Management.) ... drives and the disk cloning process. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Casper 5 - One for Anna
    ... because it only has ONE "backup" to restore ... storing several different partition copies over there, ... A clone is a clone is a clone and is only ONE backup. ... You can have as many cloned drives as ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Getting rid of dual boot setup?
    ... >> move a Windows installation freely from one partition to ... That puts the clone HD ... > many hard drives, and by manipulating the boot sequence (to ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
  • Re: Casper XPs a winner
    ... >>> can clone a physical drive a lot quicker than Ghost 9 ... >> My True Image 8 took almost 2 hours to clone ... > drive to a 160G, adjusting the partition sizes in the process, ... >>> Or if you just want to use images on hard drives too. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: Transferring from HD to HD
    ... copy XP from the 40gb hd onto the 100gb partition of the second HD. ... 40GB partitions on the 160GB HD, or you can clone the 40GB ... system HD to boot any of the clones in the backup HD. ... partitions can only be done by Casper XP and Ghost 9 and 10 ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
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