Image or clone the hard drive? Best option?

Would appreciate your help!

Have a Toshiba Satellite L655 laptop (one morning the laptop with Windows 7 upgraded itself to Windows 10). Would like to use Macrium Reflect Free to create an image of its hard drive. Have no clue whether I need an image or whether I need to clone the hard drive. It all depends on what could happen to the laptop??? This is unpredictable.

It is my understanding, that with Macrium Reflect Free you can make a single, full image of the hard drive. (However, creating scheduled images, whether incremental or differential, require the paid plan.)If data is corrupted, or, the PC becomes infected with malware, you can restore from the drive image, if the PC still boots properly and takes you to a blue screen with an option to restore your PC from an image backup.

However, if the hard drive is failing, can one use a drive image to set Windows up on a brand new hard drive?Will this involve a secondary process that is normally saved on a separate flash drive?

Prefer to do either an image or a clone, but not both. Which one would be the best to do?

Thanks for your assistance !! :)

Thanks for the info, NavyLCDR!

Does the USB flash drive need to be formatted as FAT 32, or NTFS?

Thanks!!

The USB was already FAT32, so all is good.


Have a great week!! :)

Cloning's primary function is to make a copy of hard drive, so disks can be swapped.

Image Backups primary function is to recover system to SAME drive. It can also be used to indirectly clone a new drive.

For backup purposes, system image backup is what you need as more flexible and backups are compressed taking less soace, and you can have multiple backups at differnt stages to suit (full or differential).

Thanks for the info cereberus!


Just want to make a single, full image of the hard drive.

To create scheduled images, incremental or differential, it is my understanding, would have to upgrade to a paid plan.

Thanks cereberus,

Will keep that in mind.

Have a great week!!