Skip to main content

Difference Between Disk Backup and Clone Disk

Thread needs solution

What is the difference if I backup my C drive using disk backup or if I use clone disk?

I made a backup disk years ago using True Image disk backup only to have it not work when I tried to do a recovery. The forums seem to be littered with people in the same boat not being able to recover their systems with Acronis backups so I don't want to get burned again this time and need to be 100% sure I have a recoverable backup.

 

0 Users found this helpful

1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone

Bobbo's Cloning the right way

Bobbo's Backup vs clone

The thing with backups of any kind is they need to be tested from time to time.  i don't really know why your backup failed - perhaps the data backed up was corrupt, or the medium it was backed up to had issues, or the bios settings were bad.  It could have been data corruption, user error, system settings, no way to know at this point.

Ultimately, if you can afford it (or have one already), you should validate real world recoveries from time to time on a non-production (a secondary or old drive).  Take out the original, install the new/temp/old drive - whatever one is not the original.  The restore your backup to it with the orignal disconnected.  Then make sure it boots. If it does, you know your process is truly good and that backup is truly good.  Having only a single backup (or few) and never testing them is sure to leave you high and dry when you really need it to count.  I've seen DVD's/CD's just go bad for no reason (even in case where they're never used).  Hard drives with backups can still fail - especially if they were failing to begin with.  Many users don't understand their computer bios and/or the settings needed to be able to boot their recovery correctly and/or esnure that the recovery is successful (many times, you have to go in and change the boot order after a recovery or the bios will try to boot something else and give you some random error like MBR not found).

Personally, I stay away from clones.  They offer no backup at all so if something goes wrong (say you clone the blank to the full disk and wipe out everything), you're high and dry.  If you want the best of both worlds, take a backup first and store it for safety and recovery.  Then, you can either try to clone or restore the backup.  Either way, unless you have absolutely no other choice, you should always try to maintain the original drive - regardless of it's shape, as a possible fallback.  

I don't know how big your current drive is, but decent SSD's are pretty cheap.  Seems like the price has gone up on Amazon since Christmas is right around the corner, but you can usually get GOOD (Samsung, PNY, Crucial, Mushkin) 250GB drives for $65 - they seem to be pushing $70 right now though.  The benefit of having a "spare" drive to work with is so that you can take a backup of the existing drive, pull it for safekeeping and restore the image to a new/fast SSD.  Now you have a nice, fast, cheap SSD and if things go south for some reason, you have your old, original drive as a fall back for this scenario and it can be used for validtating and recovering other backups in the future without impacting your new SSD drive.

Or, if space is an issue, you can go with a slower non SSD with more space.  1TB spinning drives are also about $65 these days.  I'd go with SSD performance over storage if storage is not the issue though and you're willing to shell out $65 to improve your backup and recovery capabilities and possibly increase your computer performance.

1TB spinning drive on Amazon $50 (slow compared to an SSD, but a lot of space)

And, having more than one backup, created in different ways is another good backup idea.  You can use Acronis to take images online (from within windows), but before doing any major upgrades or changes, I always take a full disk "offline" backup and tend to use those.  I like my backup to not be impacted by the state of the OS, running applications, malware, anitivirus, etc.   Offline backups work completely outside of the OS and makes them that much more reliable as a result.  If you're planning to make changes, an offline backup is the way to go.