Tears of a Clone

Want to avoid ending up crying later by learning now.

Just installed ti11 and I "believe" I successfully created my first total disk image (80GB) to my external hard drive (750GB), and also created a bootable CD. So far so good.

Questions:

1. I plan on doing incremental or differential backups every few days. Is there a general preference among users between incremental or differential? Time isn't an issue as it goes so fast on my system.

2. Do you always "validate" the backup after running it?

3. What is the benefit of the "use sector by sector approach"? Do most choose this option?

4. Is imaging the way most people use the system, or do most use the clone function? What is the difference, and your preferences?

5. Is cloning similar to the FD-ISR product?

6. Courtesy question: Should I be asking each of these questions on different threads?

Thanks for the guidance and your patience,
Chamlin

 

I'd say more use incrementals in a bid to save space. Many of us just make fulls but don't necessarily do evey partition on a multi-partition disk. If I were to do such backups it probably would be a Full once a week and then about 6 incrementals and then repeat the process. Remember, if you have one bad incremental in a chain all succeeding incrementals are useless. A differential is better in this regard. Always have more than one backup even if it is not a recent one.

Yes. It tells me all is well with my hardware. Once TI is demonstrated to work on your system it will always work unless you have a HW problem, IMO.

I believe that is a TI11 new feature which I don't have. If I'm correct, it forces TI to backup the entire partition not just the in-use sectors. There is no benefit if TI is working properly and makes your backups very large. TI normally identifies the type of file-system you have and then backs it up accordingly. If it didn't understand the filesystem because of corruption or it was unknown then it reverted to the all sector backup.

I always image and even install a new disk by imaging. If you cloned your drive to your external you would only be able to have one clone rather than many images. Cloning is intended to move from an old disk to a new disk - not backups.

My understanding of FD-ISR is that is is a fancy Windows System Restore and will do nothing for you if your HD dies. You can also, albeit a bit more cumbersome, achieve the functionality of such a product by making an image before installing new software etc. If it doesn't work, then restore the image.

Not for an initial general inquiry; just fine the way you did it.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Guys, this is all very helpful. I'm feeling much more confident about moving forward. I will now return to the manuals/help sections/these boards to dig further for clarity on my implementation of this all.