Backup Terminology

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Using True Image Home ver. 10. To date I’ve not had any occasion where I’ve had to restore an image. My regular backups are complete system images stored on an external USB drive.
1) What is the difference between creating a disk image and cloning a disk – or are they one and the same?
2) Must either of these be restored to a disk of identical size as the original, or (in case of a complete disk failure) can they be restored to a larger replacement disk?

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John,
A Back Up Image is a true copy of everything on a particular drive, including Reg settings, Track Zero with MBR for that particular drive. You would normally use an image restore to revert back to the exact condition of a drive back to the Image date, in case of major file or folder or OS problems. It will default to restore to the same size partition as before unless specified. ( I have never tried this change )

A Clone of a drive is used if you might find that your hard disk does not have enough space for the operating system and installed applications, preventing you from updating your software. In this case, you have to transfer the system to a higher-capacity hard disk.Acronis

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Bob, Joe & Al,
Thanks for the clarification on this. Now I’ve got things straight.

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Here’s the Acronis take on it – Disk Clone tool – simply move the entire contents of one hard disk drive to another..

Joe

--Joe

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My choice of words for what Bob said: A backup IMAGE is (normally) a single file, containing, as Bob said, everything on the disk that gets backed up. The image is not “usable” in its image form unless you mount it temporarily to extract files from the image.

A CLONE is an exact copy of the entire contents of one drive to another, without making the image. The cloned drive is immediately usable providing the jumpers etc. are properly set. The “usual” purpose of a clone IS to copy the exact contents of one drive to that of a larger drive, although you can restore an image to a larger drive as well. Another way of saying it is that the clone process eliminates the “middleman” step of making an image and THEN restoring that image to another drive.

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