![]() Some backup products take an additional step, sometimes referred to as “smart image backup.” Here, you back up everything needed to reboot from scratch, but you don’t back up things that aren’t necessary. Imaging also allows you to store multiple image files on any sufficiently large hard drive, which provides increased security and flexibility. Assuming you’re regularly backing up your drive, you can rest assured all your data-including the recent additions-is safe. Imaging offers you the option of incrementally backing up your drive using backup software. With this limitation in mind, imaging is the better choice for backup purposes. Even if you clone your drive periodically-say, every week or two weeks-you can only hold one clone on one drive at any given time, due to the immense amount of space the clones require. Unlike imaging, you must make a clone manually. This is the main issue with cloning-it’s a wholly ineffective form of backing up your data. However, if you cloned your drive a while back, you can bet you’ve lost any data you created in the interim. If it was recently, you probably haven’t lost much data. However, the suitability of this type of recovery depends on when you last cloned your drive. All you’d need to do is remove the corrupt or failed drive, insert the cloned drive, and, voila-you’re roughly where you were before disaster struck. ![]() In the event of a dreaded hard drive corruption or failure, cloning gets you up and running quicker than imaging, though you’ll miss any changes made since you created the clone. Advantages and disadvantages of imaging and cloning Only then can you access your data as normal. To be functional, you need to open and install them on an existing or new drive using imaging software. Given the incomplete nature of differential images, however, they won’t suffice for restoring your drive-you’ll need a full image for that.įull images are comparable to a destination drive in cloning-but images are not drives. You can capture these images incrementally so you can account for the latest changes to your data. Whereas full images include everything on your source drive, differential images contain only the information that has changed since you created your last full image. You can break image files down into two categories-full and differential. Given the compressed nature of image files, it’s possible to store more than one on a single hard drive, move them around your LAN or the Cloud, or even place them on a memory stick. zip file, but it’s normally saved as an ISO file. This compressed file acts almost like a big. Once the process of cloning a drive is complete, you can disconnect the destination drive and install it internally.īy contrast, imaging is the process of creating a byte-by-byte archive of the contents of a hard drive as a compressed (albeit still very large) file and placing it on another drive. If, however, you have only one internal drive, you’ll need an external SATA-to-USB adapter, a dock, or an enclosure with which to connect your destination drive to your laptop or desktop. If your laptop or desktop allows for two drives, you’re in luck-you can proceed with a direct transfer from one to the other. The only problem is, you’d miss any changes you made since carrying out the clone-but with that caveat, reverting to the destination drive allows you to pick up where you left off. With cloning, if something disastrous happens to your source drive, you can revert to the destination drive. In other words, it’s the process of creating an exact replica of a drive so you can’t detect a difference between the source drive and the destination drive. To begin, let’s start by defining both cloning and imaging.Ĭloning is the one-to-one transfer of the entire contents of a hard drive to another hard drive. imaging? Which option is better for managed services providers (MSPs)? Defining cloning and imaging So, given all these commonalities, what are the differences between cloning vs. In short, they replicate everything you need to boot and run an operating system-which is why you can’t boot from a simple file-only backup. Imaging and cloning do involve the replication of files-but they also replicate boot and partition information, the allocation table, and additional data used by the operating system to locate and access the replicated files. However, it’s important to note neither involves simply copying and pasting data onto another drive. ![]() ![]() And you can use both to back up a drive or replace an old, corrupted, or failed drive with a new-hopefully faster and larger-one. ![]() Both create an exact or near exact record of your drive. For the most part, this confusion is warranted-both are information technology tactics for copying the complete content of a hard drive. Whenever there’s discussion about the difference between a clone and an image, confusion between the two terms abounds. ![]()
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