Advantage of "sector by sector" backup method

What is the advantage of the "sector by sector" backup method?
What are cons of this?

What is the advantage of not having "sector by sector" option selected?
What are the cons of this?

 

1 example is if your drive is encrypted, then you would need to use sector by sector.

sector by sector basically makes a clone of the whole drive (including free space)

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

The sector-by-sector method allows you to create an image of all sectors of the selected partition. This image will contain not only sectors with data but also sectors that are empty. As a result, this image will be equal in size to the disk being imaged, as there will be no data compression. This method is useful if a partition being backed up is not supported by the Acronis product or is corrupted. In this case, all sectors of this partition are included in this image and will be restored.

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee

 

I think you get the same corrupt sector table as the original drive and any sectors marked bad on the original will be marked bad on the target. Generally, the least of your worries if you are trying to recover from a crash.

 

Another slight con of the sector-by-sector is that probability can be against you. Since there can be much more "data" in the archive there is an increased risk of something not being handled correctly. Since more time and space is required you are probably less likely to make an archive when it might keep you out of trouble.

A con of the regular archive is that some filesystem errors might cause a problem with TI since it does use the filesystem info for its backup/restore even though it images at the sector level. In practice TI is quite tolerant of filesystem problems but not always. Good idea to run chkdsk /f at least every now and then before making an image.