Why not clone to external?
On https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlXkYKzY6vs the "official" Acronis youtube "How to clone a disk with Acronis True Image 2016 " it says don't clone to an external drive because it's unbootable. However what is wrong with this sequence?
1. Clone physical drive (the one with drive C) to external - let's say, 1T Dell to a 1T external WD.
2. Virus, or poorly behaving Microsoft software upgrade, or accidental deletion, ruins drive C.
3. You boot Acronis rescue CD, and say clone from external to the physical drive. Acronis says, "hey there's data on that drive, overwrite anyway?" You say yes, sure, of course.
4. You now have perfectly the same drive as when you first cloned it.
Wouldn't that achieve a perfectly blissful restore, or do I misunderstand something?
I am considering buying a 1T external just for this purpose. I lean to cloning as I perceive that it gives the most perfect byte-for-byte recovery, better than a regular backup image (correct me if I'm high).
However if you talk me out of it, I still might get a 1T internal (my new Dell has 3 bays; I may buy big tower for even more). Then I would clone every night; then I could restore simply by telling BIOS to boot the clone physical drive instead. Does that work too?
In theory, you could perfome the procedure you describe in your first post. In practice, you wouldn't. You would create an image of the disk. That produces at TIB file with all the disk-level information. In case of a problem you would restore the image.
The key benefit of this is that you can keep several versions of the disk info stored on the backup disk, so that you can pick which date you restore to. Imagine you perform a new clone to update your backup, but then you realize later that a key file has been deleted...
Pat, your answer is perfectly consistent with the experts' approach, yet you're the first (that I've seen) to state that a "normal" (non-clone) backup contains all DISK LEVEL INFO. If that's really completely true, then, yes, I can see that I could just be handicapping myself by cloning, since you could only clone to the same size drive, and have only one generation (actually, only one backup at all) per target drive, as you say.
I'm just queasy because of long held beliefs that perhaps are now inapplicable. Here's how the world used to work: "normal" backups would get every file. If you restored, it would copy back every file. Mind you, the fat and protected disk areas would not be restored, and Mr. Virus would still win. This used to apply to every "normal" backup product, even great ones like FastBack. The only way to destroy EVERY bit of the virus would be to use Norton Ghost and replace every byte and bit. This is what I equate cloning to now.
The question in my mind is, does only restoring the .TIB files really completely erase all damage from a virus, such as a perfect clone restore would? I understand that it (regular .TIB backup) would restore all lost files, and that's important, but does it as well destroy everything else (i.e. infection)? It so, then why does the clone have all those restrictions, that it 1. reformats the restore target, 2. reformats the clone target whenever you make a clone; and for that matter, 3. restricts itself to only utilizing the amount of space cloned and wasting the rest of the clone target? Cloning must achieve something extra that I'm not seeing, for all these penalties you pay to use it, vs. a regular full disk backup (i,e. .TIB).
It is my impression that Acronis uses low-level filesystem functions provided by Microsoft/Windows for the exact pupose of creating a very precise image of a disk. I guess it is similar to what Microsoft itself does inside say the disk defragmenter. Or that fabbled Volume Shadow Service that I don't know anything about but have seen it mentioned, usually in angry tones, a couple of times.
Guessing, I think the file-system functions allows an application like ATI to request that Windows starts time-stamping and keeping track of all changes to disk sectors. So when ATI begins to copy the disk, it is getting a snap-shot of all the disc sectors at that exact time. Windows continues to function, continues to write data to the disk, and all normal apps will see the new data, but ATI will get the old data until it has finised the image process and releases the time-lock. So, if Microsoft did its work correct, you should get a perfect, sector by sector image stored in the TIB file.
As for the formatting, well, the cloning process needs to replicate the partition information, including boot sector information. I guess it is possible to do some resizing and deleting of existing partions, but resizing can (is?) time consuming, and I am not sure about the boot information. I assume that it is simply easier, faster and safer to do a quick format of the destination, create clean partitions as needed, and start cloning.