Recommendations on Cloning Software

Thanks for the clarification. For my sins, I mainly use the built in MS system imaging. I'm unfamiliar with the finer details of Macrium. I may well have to become familiar, now that Microsoft has deprecated their imaging in the upcoming Fall Creators Update. :)

Bree said:

Thanks for the clarification. For my sins, I mainly use the built in MS system imaging. I'm unfamiliar with the finer details of Macrium. I may well have to become familiar, now that Microsoft has deprecated their imaging in the upcoming Fall Creators Update. :)

IIRC, when I set up Macrium Free, differential backup wasn't available. I went with incremental. I have a limited understanding of the both diff and incr. Which is more effective? Is it worth paying for the full product too get diff? I freed up several spare neurons in anticipation [emoji41] Thank you.

NavyLCDR said:

However, most cloning software does not do true bit by bit cloning. Most cloning software, by default, really only does file copy. See the below screenshot from the Advanced Options menu of Macrium Reflect. Intelligent copy is selected by default, which only copies over files. You would have to change that to Forensic Sector Copy to be able to, theoretically, retrieve deleted files from the clone.

Good point!

NavyLCDR said:

This is just on my home network, and a NAS is very easy to set up. I have two NAS units, each with 2x 3TB hard drives. Each NAS is a RAID 1 box, so each one contains two hard drives that are exact mirrors of each other p so the total capacity of each box is 3 TB, if one drive fails in the box, all you have to do is swap it out, and the box will mirror the remaining hard drive with the data to the new hard drive inserted automatically.
A clone is an exact copy of a hard drive. You should be able to clone one drive to another, and the second drive will act and work exactly like the first drive. My RAID 1 NAS has two hard drives in it that are clones (mirrors) of each other, so if one fails, the other one will still be good and act just like the failed one.
An image is the contents of one or more partitions that gets saved to a single file. It's like the old .zip files. One advantage is that the image can be compressed, a clone cannot. So my 120GB SSD can be saved in a 40GB image file. If it was cloned, the clone would have to be 120GB as well. If the 120GB SSD fails, then replace it with a new one, boot from a rescue drive (USB flash drive), restore the saved image to the new 120GB SSD, and then the new SSD will work just like the old one it replaced.

I think I missed this response.

Very informative answer! Thanks! :)

cereberus said:

A differential file on a given day contains all the difference since last full backup.

An incremental backup contains all the difference since last incremental backup.

Incremental backups are more space efficient but in reality the difference is very small for most domestic users. The free version only does differentials.

I prefer differentials as you can delete any intermediate ones and last differential will still work as it is independent of other differentials.

Incrementals are daisy chained, so if you delete intermediate ones, last one is useless as chain has been broken.

Upgrading to a paid version just for incrementals is not worth it unless you create massive amounts of data daily - rare in domestic world.

However, there are good features such as Rapid Delta Restore that make it worth buting Home imo.

Cereberus, I see clearly now!! Many thanks for the help.

+1 vote for Macrium