Backup vs. cloning

What's the difference between backing up a partition and cloning? Does restoring a partition backup return it to its original state? Or does it just restore the original files?

 

joncosby,

Does this help?

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#14

What is the difference between an "image" and a "clone"?

 

Still not sure if restoring a partition image returns it to its original state, or just replaces the files that were backed up.

 

Well I've done the full archiving (image), complete with partitions, and put that in an external hard drive. Then hours later, restored my internal HDD. It returns your HDD to its state at the time you did the archiving.

I plan doing a new full archive every Friday.

 

In simple terms, an image such as made by TI and others does not backup files in the traditional sense where the backup program locates via the file system a file that needs to be backed up and then writes the file to another device or includes it within a large file containing other files that require backing up.

TI looks at the in-use sectors and directly backs up the sectors without going through the file system which is why it is so much faster than a file-based backup and why it is a total backup of the partition.

When it restores the image it writes the sector data back to the disk. However, it does not necessarily put the sector content back in the same sector, that is, the data contained in sector abcd is not necessarily put back into sector abcd on a restore. So in that case, the restored partition may not have the identical layout of the original. Nontheless, all of the data is restored. Files or sectors are not restored to an existing configuration when restoring a full image - one of the first steps in restoring a partition is deleting the existing partition before the archive is restored. This of course means all data must be contained in the archive image.

 

Ah, thanks. That answers my question.