Image or clone?

Can someone explain to this newby what the difference between an image and cloning a drive?

 

An Image is mostly used as a disaster backup, saved on a drive other than your main hard drive.
A Clone is an exact copy of your drive put on another drive, typically used to setup a different computer with the exact same information.

 

MerlinAZ,

Is it still not the same thing just used for two different reasons?

 

Not exactly.
An Image is saved as a single file (on an NTFS formatted hard drive. On FAT 32 there is a 4GB limit so there would be several files depending on the size of the original drive.)
This single file contains the entire snapshot of the original hard drive, but the contents can't be seen in Windows Explorer. You would have to load it as a "virtual drive" to see the individual files, if you wanted to restore a few folders, for instance. This program will do this.

A Clone will also copy the entire drive to another hard drive, but this will look exactly the same in Windows Explorer. It is mostly used to move an entire drive to another computer to have an exact setup, or you could also swap a cloned hard drive for one that was corrupted to get running again (but that would mean opening your system and swapping hard drives).

Hope this helps.