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Difference Between Cloning and Backup?

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Hello,

I happen to be on True Image 2013, but I assume the questions remains relevant.

I want to be able to restore my hard drive to a clean config like the one after I just set it up.

What is the difference between cloning and backup?

I basically want the hard drive to look the same as when I installed it the very first time, regardless of added files. I back up files to the cloud so I really need my applications to come back to normal. I can scoot the files I back up like word and excel files back into the appropriate places. I just don't like reinstalling all my applications after a hard drive / windows failure/ virus infection.

So: should I clone or backup? And what are the differences/drawbacks?

Best,

Tom Claugus II

0 Users found this helpful

I think in your case, the only difference is TIME. For example, if you CLONE and you loose your hard disk ie: failure, all you would need to do is open the case, rip out the old drive and replace it with the new one, and close it up and Boot !. If you do a image backup, and the same problem occurs, you will need to open the case up, rip out the old drive, replace it with a new one, and close the case. Now you would need to boot from your ATI recovery disk, and restore your backed up image. The end is the same result. A disk that looks like the same as when you originally backed it up.

Down sides to cloning, if you its a 1tb disk, you need another 1tb disk to clone to. Doing an image backup, would maybe take only 1/10 of the 1tb storage needed for a clone.

What I normally do is immediately after installing the OS, I do an image backup. After installing all of my app's, I do another image backup. I save those 2 images for as long as the OS lives. If I ever need them, I have them. But normally if I have a failure, I usually want to restore my system to the way it was just before the failure.

Hope this helps.

To me, the biggest down side to cloning is the risk factor. Probably the biggest risk is a misake by the user. Either from inexperience or from being so familiar with cloning that is becomes second natutre and he gets in a hurry and fails to really pay attention to details. A mistake by the user or a program or power malfunction means the loss of all the data on the master disk. Some users can reover from backups but some have no other backups. So, I avoid cloning and do backups and use the backups for my recovery and I be sure that my backups incolude DISK IMAGE BACKUPs which include ALL partitions..

When I clone, I name my disks SOURCE and TARGET, so there is no chance I will make a mistake. Not everone does this, but if u can it helps.

David