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Image or clone?

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Samson:
Hi Shane,

Just got given a couple of HDDs, have installed one in each of my machines (see sig below), both as slave drives. Formatted both and they are healthy. As a backup would you recommend imaging the master drive or cloning it?

Shane:
That depends. Every backup is different depending on the situation.

For myself, here at home I have about 300 GB of data. So I only backup what I cant replace. And so it is a simple backup.

But at some of my customers they have servers going. They dont like down time. So I have it scheduled to do a full image of the drives every night. If it goes down I can do a total restore to a new drive and have it up and running fast instead of reinstalling everything.

So it is up to you. A clone and an image are just the same thing. Backing up the entire drive and saving it to an image file. Or cloning the drive to another. In this case image would be best so other programs dont get confused on which drive to use (The main or the clone).

Shane

Samson:
Hi Shane,

Thanks for that.

One final question (on this topic anyway  :wink:)

If I image a disk, and then want to restore that image to a new HDD, will it be bootable?

Shane:
Should be. If it is a good backup program it should image everything including the boot sectors :wink:

Shane

Samson:
Hi Shane,

Thanks again, just wanted to check first  :shy:

I was looking at Macrium Reflect (free edition) and/or Acronis True Image (seagate edition), I'll give it a go on the weekend.

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