Whats the difference?

For the past year or so, every month have taken a True Image of my 'C' drive which is 60gig (only 37gig used), and yesterday was successful in cloning this 'C' drive to an 80gig desktop USB2 hardrive, my question is why the both, if one could take a clone once a month, or am I missing the point totally.
Your thoughts gratefully received.

 

Cloning is designed for moving an OS and all programs and file to a new hard drive for upgrade or replacement.

Imaging is supposed to be your "backup".

 

Please forgive me for not being the fastest car on the grid, but surely a clone is a complete backup,and if you do them on alternate hardrives (so you can format one whilst the other is the latest, in case of hardrive failure), aren't you having the best of both worlds.

 

Whilst what you do will surely work I much prefer using imaging. In your method you presumably have your main drive and two others. When you decide to update your backups you may only have one available from an earlier date to cover for an emergency.

Using imaging and two spare drives, at any time I can have 5 or 6 complete images on one of the drives while the other sits on a shelf in case of a real disaster or for testing purposes.

With cloning, the way you do it, I presume you will physically swap drives over at backup time. This in itself carries some risk and can be a bit of a chore unless you use HDD sleeves in your computer. With imaging actually swapping drives over is a rare event. Backups can be scheduled to happen automatically from within Windows on a daily basis and one can get on with other things.

Xpilot.

 

Just to add my 2 cents on this topic.

With any Image backup you will never know with 100% certainty that when the time comes to restore your image that it will work successfully.

Yes, you can do integrity checks and even do a test restore but when the time comes when you really need it you never know what will happen.

With cloning, you are basically doing the restore immediately and you know if it works or it doesn't. You have removed one unknown from the equation.

Personally I take backups, but I always take a deep breath when the time comes to do a restore, especially if I just clobbered my boot drive.

It comes down to your comfort level I suppose. And if you have enough drives handy.

 

Thanks for the very knowledgeable inputs, and the concensus seems to be "make a true image".
Not quite sure if a true image is bootable (if i remove it from it's USB/IDE caddy)and connect it to m/board even if I set the jumper to master. I don't want every time I boot to this hardrive to use a boot disc (I want it to run under it's own steam). still

 

You appear to still be not understanding. Hope this helps:

A clone is copying of a disk so you then have two disks which are identical. You can then physically remove the original disk from your computer and replace it with the cloned disk. Booting by turning on the computer will then start the computer as normal.
The bootable CD is only involved for the cloning process, it is not used when you are normally booting a computer.

Image creation is used to backup one or more individual partitions from a disk. In TI9 you can also create an image of individual folders and files from a partition. Using either the bootable CD or the installed Windows version of TrueImage results in an image containing information about data from whatever partitions you want to backup. The image is a compressed version of the data. This image is either stored in the special TrueImage Secure Zone (if you use this option) or as a file with a .tib extension on a disk in whichever partition you nominate.
An image can be used later to restore the data from that image back to the original disk replacing the corresponding partitions or folders or files as appropriate. Obviously if you do an image restore you will lose any changes you did to those partitions/folders/files after you created the backup image being used for the restoration.
Note that although you might create an image of a partition from a bootable disk, the image itself is not in a format which can be used to boot a computer. You would need to restore an image of a partition to a disk (which itself must contain the information necessary for the booting process) in order that booting can proceed successfully. TrueImage is very flexible and can be used in ways which require a more detailed knowledge of such things as disk MBR (Master Boot Record) and boot.ini files. If the image is being restored to the partition from which it was originally created, as would usually be the case when doing a backup recovery, then the necessary disk structure would already be in place and so not be an issue.
The image restore can be done using either the bootable CD or the installed Windows version of TrueImage. For folder/file restore it is necessary to use TI9 Windows version. The bootable CD is not used when you are normally booting a computer after the restoration is complete.

 

Message understood, and printed for reference, tachyon42 thankyou for going into such detail, also everybody else for helping to make my life easier, will close this post now.