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I just purchased, and am about ready to use Acronis Ture Image 2014.

I would like to know the functional difference between:
1) CLoning my C:\ drive as an inmage backup to an other SATA drive; vs. 2) backing up an image of C:\ to the backup drive then restoring that to an other SATA drvive.

All this is to have a bootable disk sitting and ready to operate in case the C:\ fails or corrupts.

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The Acronis cloning function is at disk level. The clone function does not clone single partitions. You would be cloning the entire system disk.

IF the backup is CORRECTLY performed so ALL partitions of the system disk (as shown in Windows Disk Mangement Graphical view); and IF the restore is properly performed, then there is NO functional difference between the two procedues.

The clone function is a direct copy from source to target and slightly quicker but has the risk factor of a user error or malfunction which can ruin the source disk. A safe procedure would be to do the disk image backup first prior to performing the clone function.
Wherease, the backup creates an interim file and it is the interim file which is restored to the new disk. This takes longer to do the extra function but the risk factor is non-existant as the source does not need to be connected to computer--only the backup container needs to be connected. Note that only MBR type disks can be cloned using the clone function. If GPT, a backup and restore is required.

As you are new to TrueImage, I believe you would benefit by reviewing my signature link 2-A in detail and you may also have an interest in my signature link #3 as well as other signature links. Note the2014 Acronis Web-help file along the left margin.

Adding to this conversation. The result of a cloning operation is a disk, identical to the original one (can be a different size). The result of a backup is a file containing all the disk-level information necessary to be restored onto any disk. To simplify: cloning is backup and restore in the same operation.
The benefits of backups are numerous: you can keep several backups on the same disk for safekeeping (you can't do this with clones, or you need several physical disks). Backups can be incremental, scheduled, managed, etc.