Is it better to Clone or Image?

Hi,

Just finished installing my removable backup caddy. I will alternate two Seagate 320gb hdd's (one per week for off-site storage).

I am using TI10 Home & wish to completely backup C: (max partition is 30GB) & My Documents to the removable drive.

Is it better to clone or image a drive (what are the plus's & minus's), plus how would incremental backups go with the two hard drives being alternated off-site each week.

Thanks in advance.

 

A clone will make an exact copy of the source drive including all unused space. So if you're cloning an 80GB drive to a 160GB drive you end up with 80GB used on the destination drive and 80GB unallocated. This unless you've chosen to expand the existing partition(s) to fill the destination drive.

Now if you create an image of an 80GB drive that has say 20GB used space, you might end up using normal compression with an image say 15GB. You could put a lot of such images on a 160GB drive.

Now judge for yourself which is the best backup scenario.

 

A clone will make an exact copy of the source drive including all unused space. So if you're cloning an 80GB drive to a 160GB drive you end up with 80GB used on the destination drive and 80GB unallocated. This unless you've chosen to expand the existing partition(s) to fill the destination drive.

Now if you create an image of an 80GB drive that has say 20GB used space, you might end up using normal compression with an image say 15GB. You could put a lot of such images on a 160GB drive.

Now judge for yourself which is the best backup scenario.

As for incrementals I prefer doing full images. Incremental images very often are the same size as full images.

Edit: Sorry for the double post. Something went wrong here.

 

Thanks dld,

I understand, but apart from the disk space saving using imaging what is the benefit of cloning the disk?

I am actually thinking of doing imaging with incrementals during the week, then each week before disk changeover do I full back.

Current useage on backup drive today after full backups are:
C Drive = Actual 13GB = Backup 7GB
My Documents = Actual 58GB = Backup 55GB (There is already a lot of highly compressed files in My Documents)

Backup disk size = 320GB = tons of backup space.

I will experiment to see how much extra space the incrementals do in fact take up.

Thanks for the info

 

Cloning is intended to be used when replacing an old disk with a new one. Naturally, if you make a clone of the disk then you do have a backup if you don't wipe the old disk. It isn't a very efficient method in terms of space but some users like having a clone to pop in if their disk fails. IMO, disk failures are rare so it isn't a good idea for me.

 

Am I right in assuming that if you have a disk failure, you can still restore the image to a new disk and be fully operational again.

 

Yes, that is the idea of having an image.