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Clone versus Backup & Restore

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In terms of consistent reliability, are there any scientific data studies that have been done to compare a cloned system versus one done with Acronis Backup? Does anyone have any experience that would suggest using one method over the other from a reliability standpoint? Thanks for your inputs,

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Personally, I tend to prefer making an image and restoring that as it is more flexible. There is no clear cut answer here, the pros and cons cancel each other out to some extent.

Cloning - is a once only whereas making images you can schedule them if you wish, access them without having to restore them via mounting or exploring the image.

Cloning does have the advantage that you will know immediately if it was successful and does allow you to 'plug and play' when you have a drive failure and there is less likelihood of data corruption and as I mentioned if it is corrupted you will know so long as you try the drive immediately after cloning has finished.

Images on the other hand can be restored a number of times, images can be validated after they have been imaged, if only full images are made corruption is least likely, though corruption is rare when making images disk to disk.