Yes that is correct. The advantage of cloning has over imaging is that with cloning you dont need to do a restore step because you have a perfect copy of the original drive already sitting on the clone drive. If your system is configured correctly you should be able to change you BIOS boot order and immediately boot into the clone drive. I don't know if your situation requires that kind of speed versus having to take the time to restore the backup image. Luckily I have never had to do a full image restore (knock on wood) so for me the speed isnt as crucial because I dont plan on having to do it often and I have other systems I can use if one goes down. Yes, exactly. Yep, that is the advantage, you can store multiple images (because of the compression) in the same space that a single clone drive would require. Having several backups is definitely a good idea in case you don't notice that you permanently deleted an important file for a week or two. Also you dont have to do a full image restore, you can mount the backup image as a drive letter and then browse and restore select files if you need to. Its very nice.
OK, thanks for the info on the diff between imaging and cloning, guys. There are some issues w/cloning, as I understand it, not sure if they've been brought up in this discussion yet. This is from John Will, a knowledgable member on the Tech Support Guy forum: And: Harold
I've never had any issues with cloning and Windows assigning a drive letter. Maybe it's because I have all my HDs set to Cable Select (CS) ?? In any event, Windows always indicates the slave HD as "D:", and when I put it in the primary position, Windows indicates it as "C:" I swap them around freely, and there's never been a question or problem. (And, I don't necessarily "remove HD after cloning" as a requirement.)
Too late now (sorry) but Woot had a really good deal on 250GB WD refurb drives today, $50 + $5 ship. That's a good price to pick up a couple of spare drives for storing backups without dealing with rebates. Maybe they will have them again. http://www.woot.com/
I just bought a new hd, made a clone using Acronis and noticed m$ softs need to be activated. I really don't want to go thru this each and every time I clone. Is there a way around this? Or do I just not clone excel? tia, nt
nononsense, You said Go LINUX Are you saying use Knoppix to copy the hd or forget using m$ and use open office? nt