Image or Clone

Yesterday I had the dubious pleasure of a massive virus attack so I ended up doing a format & clean re-install, Xp SP3
Well I have re-installed most of the programs I was running and decided that maybe I better start running a backup of my main drive, before I do stupid things again

So the question is what is the better option?

I have Acronis True Image (well at least the Seagate version) which allows me to either clone or do an Image, I have used Clone before & did try Image once but the image failed for some reason, (that was done with File and Setting Transfer Wizard in XP)

At the moment I am running 2 drives in my desktop, an 80gb Sata (main) and a 200gb IDE for storage and safe keeping, plus I have a 30gb laptop drive in a usb case which I usually use for transferring larger folders to & from my other computers, but I think it is now better served as a backup drive of my main computer start-up drive?
Any suggestions would be helpful
Regards Jac

 

If you clone a drive, you've done just that and now you have two drives with identical information on them but you can only use one at a time so you're in an either or situation. If you have a spare drive to use for this and don't mind keeping it stored in a drawer or on a shelf, well ............ you've got a perfect backup as of the time you cloned the drive.

Imaging a drive makes an iso or in the case of acronis, a .tib file that can be stored on a second drive in your computer (or on DVD's or other removable media) and then used to restore your computer's system drive at some future point in time. Its like putting something in a safe deposit box that you can always get to when and if the need arises. With Acronis there's another advantage in that you can keep adding to that image file as you add things to your computer so it becomes more than just a single snapshot from a single point in time. For obvious reasons, thats known as an incremental backup to an existing image file.

From my perspective, an image ties up fewer resources (your spare drive sitting in a drawer) and is considerably more flexible but both have their advantages. I image my drives once every month or two but I also use other software to make automatic daily backups from several selected data folders. That way if I do encounter a catastrophic drive failure I may lose the last 24 hours but nothing more. I can replace a hard drive and be back up and running fully restored in less than a half hour.

I also run periodic backups to another machine just in case and I use removable drive bays for my hard drives that get the bulk of my backups. That way I can pull the drive with a twist of a key and take it with me in an emergency.

The important thing here is to have some kind of a backup procedure in place.

 

I use TeraByte Unlimited - Image for Windows and back up to my second HD (FAT32). It takes me about 10 minutes for a full backup so I make one every other day.

I use FAT32 so that the main drive (NTFS) can be restored from a DOS floppy or CD.

 

I'll have to check that out John. I'm not familiar with it but there are a lot of things that fit into that category.

I use both Ghost (circa 2003) and Acronis for imaging and Ghost lets me run from a floppy. I use Karen's Replicator for daily data backups. It works across a network too. Check out www.karenware.com - you won't be disappointed in any of her free apps.

The only problem I see to that FAT32 philosophy is file size limitations - 4 gigs. Could make it tough going for a limited number of users.

 

Thanks Rockster & John,
I will go with the Image process, that way I can still use the external for other things as before, might still run the image to both the external & my secondary drive It can't hurt!
Valuable lesson learnt from what happened!!
Ps: have downloaded replicator & will give it ago

 

I guess its 6 of one, half-dozen of the other but I would lean toward the image as well.

I do backups (images) with Acronis. I used to do clones but I guess I kind of lost the reasoning (and inspiration) behind that and don't do them anymore.

I can do a backup of my primary partition in about 10 minutes. I'm not a fan of incremental or differential backups simply because the full backups are so fast anyway - why bother?

If I recall correctly, cloning takes a lot longer in Acronis.