Since way back I think I've misled myself about cloning vs. image/backup. I was unsure of incremental and differential. For one thing, I wondered "will that include settings changes"? I ran across this explanation;
"Disk cloning entails creating an exact, uncompressed replica of an entire drive or specific partitions. Since disk clones are uncompressed, they can be immediately replicated to a target backup drive or the cloud, resulting in an up-to-date, identical copy of the data. The critical advantage of cloning over disk imaging is speed. In the event of a hard drive failure, the cloned drive can be quickly replaced, minimizing downtime"
These are my current settings.
Medium compression
I'm not looking to copy the entire disk, just the OS partiition and the other partiitons associated with it, tho I understand that I could probably just do the C\: partition, unless something changes along the way, such as altering the recovery partition wtat occurred for some users with KB5034441.
So, aside from compression, what is the difference between what I do as an Image backup, and a clone? Since I'm using compression, won't that make the image smaller?
If I clone, with no compression, will that make the backup and restore operations faster?