Recommendations on Cloning Software

OldMike65 said:

One more think using Macrium, you should keep all your complete image backups on an external drive, if you have one, if not on a 2nd internal drive,

When I say "clone" I mean an exact copy of the entire hard-drive and that is bootable. So, yes, when I clone my Mac it has to be an external HDD.

OldMike65 said:

and always make your Macrium Rescue Recovery on a usb stick. Macrium once you install it, has the option for you to make this recovery disk. Also imports any drivers needed to boot.

What is the purpose of that?

lx07 said:

For the simple reason that without a bit of faffing windows will not boot from an external drive. I used CCC until you had to pay for it now I use SuperDuper. The facility to boot from a backup doesn't exist on Windows (at least not simply).
What all these products do is make an image. This can either be a compressed image (in their own proprietary format) or a sector by sector copy to another disk. The second will be an exact copy (including other OS they don't know about like MacOS, Linux, Encrypted volumes).
What you can't do in Windows though is boot it by plugging your backup into USB and running it from there. You need to either physically swap the disks so the backup is seen as internal or use the (again proprietary bootable USB stick) to restore the image you made.
It is just how it works.

So Macrium will make an exact copy of a PC's hard-drive, it just won't be bootable, right?

However, if you "cloned" to an external-drive and then installed it as the primary, internal drive, then it would boot right?

And once you booted to your clone, it would look just like the drive you cloned, including all OS and data files, right?

Allegheny said:

So Macrium will make an exact copy of a PC's hard-drive, it just won't be bootable, right?

Correct. You can't boot Windows from external drive without some playing around. MacOS will boot from any connected drive as you know. In Windows it can be done using a separate bootloder (I use rEFInd to boot Windows) but by default, no, it will not boot.

Allegheny said:

However, if you "cloned" to an external-drive and then installed it as the primary, internal drive, then it would boot right?

Yes, absolutely. The disk is identical.

Allegheny said:

And once you booted to your clone, it would look just like the drive you cloned, including all OS and data files, right?

Yes. Again - the disk is identical.

The only difference (I use a Mac too) is that Windows doesn't boot from external drives. So you have to physically put the drive inside or restore the image from your external drive to internal.

You can make Windows boot external drives but this is another story and too long winded to go into at this point.

OldMike65 said:

Yes when you use Macrium to CLONE your drive it makes a Exact copy, which IS bootable,

Although you are correct, I think you misunderstand.

You can boot a Mac from anything connected.

I can simply copy all directories from root (C:\ in Windows terms) to an external USB drive and boot that.

Windows you can't - it will not boot from USB - I'm talking about full Windows not some PE environment.

With Windows you need to make the disk internal (so the Windows Loader will see it) or use a different loader that will find it.

lx07 said:

The only difference (I use a Mac too) is that Windows doesn't boot from external drives. So you have to physically put the drive inside or restore the image from your external drive to internal.
You can make Windows boot external drives but this is another story and too long winded to go into at this point.

Another Mac user has come to lurk around "the dark side", huh?

So, on a PC, if you had to use a cloned drive (e.g. maybe your internal drive failed), then you would install the cloned drive into your PC, boot up, and be good to go. But then what would you do next? Clone the clone to an external drive so you have a copy?

Also, would there be any other scenarios, where I as a Mac user, might need to change my normal workflow? Like do you do things different than on a Mac if you just had to restore files or access a "backup" versus a clone?

Ever since I learned about CCC, I just skip "backups" and clone everything. That way at any given time, I can "plug and boot" and be good to go - or at least up until my last clone!

Thanks.

I'm honestly not sure if you are taking the piss. Let us assume not.

No. If either my PC or Mac had a drive failure I would buy a new disk and then restore the last backup I had from my backup image.

If you make an image or a clone of a disk you can always restore individual files on either platform. It doesn't matter what software or hardware you use - you always can.

Allegheny said:

Also, I am looking for a solution that is stable, idiot-proof, and could be used to clone/backup client's data.

I'm not sure I'd use the term "idiot-proof" for any software.

Macrium has both cloning and imaging capabilities.

Cloning gives you a ready to use replication of an existing drive. Bootable if the source drive is bootable. Cloning is normally used when all is well and you just need to move to a new, usually larger, hard drive.

Macrium imaging just creates an MRIMG extension image file that is a representation of at least one partition on a drive and is usually thought of as a disaster recovery method to be used at some later date when all is NOT well. That file may or may not contain Windows or data, depending on the partitions chosen during the image file creation process. The image file can be browsed for individual files before restoration, but it's only the restoration process that would make some other drive bootable, assuming the partitions necessary to run Windows were included in the image file.

Cloning and imaging have some overlapping purposes. Either can fail or work well. Imaging is probably more commonly used here, as a disaster recovery method.

ignatzatsonic said:

Bootable if the source drive is bootable.

No it is not. Windows will not boot from an external drive. MacOS will. That was the problem the OP had.

Please read the posts above and do remember that "bootable" is not a flag that exists any more. It is an old legacy BIOS thing.

EFI doesn't care about that - only whether there is a filesystem the firmware identify (must be FAT) and then a filesystem the bootloader can read with the drivers it has loaded (NTFS, HFS, EXT, etc)

If you want to boot Windows from external device you must either use your own loader or fiddle with the Windows one. Neither are convenient and neither is automatic.