I know cloning a drive will in essence replicate it, but I have a question about imaging your OS and data partitions.
If you image the OS and data partitions and restore them on a target drive......
will the restored target drive be able to boot Windows or just contain OS related files
If its not able to boot up your laptop will using a rescue disk to boot up from allow you to operate your pc?
Yes and NoIf you image the OS and data partitions and restore them on a target drive......
You would want to Image your Drive...
As there may be other partitions required to boot your PC...
If one of those other required partitions is corrupt and you restore the OS and Data partitions, then you will still have issues with the PC
You should always do a full system backup (the whole drive)
then you could just do differential backups of the OS and Data Partitions...
As the two partitions will see the most file changes
Also Backups should be to external media, just incase of internal drive failure
To stave off, to reduce chances of, possible problems, during my backup routine, I will do a full image of Recovery Partition (only once for the first time), a full image every time of: System Reserved, "C drive" (OS partition), "D drive" (data partition). I use two external drives for each computer -- in case one of the two backup drives develops a "hiccup".
You can restore a bootable PC having all system & user files working provided you baked up all the partitions needed to boot Windows. That's the whole point of using imaging software!
Quote