For about 3 years, I have used Macrium backup software, I have always "imaged" rather than cloned. I really thought imaging was fine and don't understand why there are 2 ways of doing the back up. Thanks.
21H2
Use Clone if you want to copy partitions to a new drive (making the new equivalent to the old). Image is for backup that can be used to restore to the original. It exclude things like page file that are not required to be saved.
Cloning is when you want to create a target drive identical to the source drive, so if source drive fails, you can swap failed drive for new drive.
Note: You can only (easily) have a single clone on target drive. You can make multiple clones if you really know what you are doing.
Imaging is for primarily backing up source drive, so if OS gets corrupted, you can restore OS to source drive. You can have multiple backups at different points in time. The images are in a compressed format to save space.
You need to use a recovery drive to restore the backup to original source drive - think of the image backup like creating a zip file - you need a tool to unzip the backup.
You can restore an image to a new target drive - effectively cloning source drive but you have to do it in two steps rather than direct cloning in one step.
For backup purposes, image backups are more flexible i.e. you can restore to source drive, a target drive and you can easily have multiple space saving images on target drive.
Last edited by cereberus; 01 Oct 2022 at 01:50.
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Ok an oversimplification really (and I meant target drive).
Actually if you really know what you are doing, it is possible to partition a drive and have multiple clones but you can end up with zillions of partitions.
If you really want multiple clones on one drive, the easiest way without ebding up with zillions of partitions is to clone to virtual hard drives. This approach works on legacy bios installations as well.
Imaging lets you keep multiple versioned images (n different dates) where the first image is slower to create and larger. Subsequent images may be differential or incremental and are faster to create and smaller, allowing more efficient us of backup storage.
Macrium Reflect (licensed) has additional advanced features.
Cloning is always a complete copy, hence is the slowest and takes the largest amount of backup disk space.
Note that cloning is sometimes unfortunately used loosely in this context, and references do not always mean an exact copy.
Images are compressed - more efficient use of drive space; clones should be an exact copy.
| When to image a hard drive, and when to clone it- PCWorld
Thanks to all. Do appreciate. I do not have a cd burner on that Dell so am limited in how I back things up. So Macrium for me. Would you recommend doing a paid version - saw that "redeploy" feature which may have helped me get everything back easier, only available on paid.
Sure - I just had an error when I said source (corrected now) - in simple terms, I meant one clone per new drive. Doing more to one drive is possible but messy.
Of course, drivers for each new pc may be an issue.
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I use a different approach i.e. create a custom install.wim of source drive and create a custom installation iso.
Create Windows 10 ISO image from Existing Installation
I then take a copy the custom iso and inject drivers needed on new pc into install.wim and if pc uses nvme drives, I inject the nvme driver into boot.wim, although this is optional and you can add it at install time.
If you have paid version of Macrium Reflect, you can use the redeploy feature, but I prefer to do it as above as it is very robust albeit a lot slower.
If new pc already has a version of windows running on it, I just make sure all drivers are updated first, and then export all the drivers and inject into install.wim - somewhat overkill but when you boot new pc after "cloning", all the main drivers are already reconciled. You might get the odd one here and there that needs updating.
Naturally, I have a batch file that takes all the hard work out of doing this.
Redeploy is only needed if restoring OS to a different pc with different drivers.
I recommend you use the free version, and learn how to use it first. Then when you have some experience, consider buying paid version.
By the way - typically on Black Friday, Paramount offer 50% of single licences, and better 50% off the 4 pack licence (which is only twice cost of a single licence). So, you can either buy 1 full licence at half price or buy 4 licences for the price of 1 full licence.
For many on this forum, this is a very attractive deal.
So if you decide to buy it (it has some good features), I suggest you wait a few weeks. Of course, there is no guarantee that they will do the same offer, but they have done for last few years, so worth waiting to find out.
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