Cloning and imaging to an Ext HD

I really don't know the difference in imaging and cloning. Can someone explain it to me in easy terms. My free Acronis v8 has only the free imaging and doesn't provide cloning as I've seen with other Acronis versions.

I created a bootable disk and have also been imaging the C Drive to an external HD. However, I don't know whether I would need the cloning as well.

My needs are to do a complete back up of the OS, Firefox and all other software, applications etc I have installed.

Thank you!!

 

I'm not an Acronis user, but I believe that cloning and imaging are more or less the same, except the images are probably compressed, where with cloning is just a straight 1:1 copy of the hard drive. I wouldn't think you'd need both imaging and cloning. Imaging would be to make a back-up of your main drive to put aside in case of a disaster. You can do the same with cloning, but it's usually used to create an identical copy so you could boot to it. I commonly clone hard drives when someone has an old 40gb that's almost full; I'll clone it to a 250gb. Then I just remove the 40gb, and hook up the new 250gb, and they're up and running....

 

Is the verifying done by clicking on check image? If that is correct, then I've verified already.

Thank you.

 

I think there is room for confusion as everybody here is talking about one particular process.

Cloning

If you hook two hard drives (A and B) up to a system and run suitable software (e.g. Acronis, Drive Image) you can copy either all of Drive A to Drive B or individual partitions from drive A. This is so long as drive B is larger than drive A. Some simple (free)programs will only do a whole drive this way, better ones will allow you to select partitions.

The copying is done byte by byte placing the copied byte in the same position on the B drive as it was on the source A drive. This includes the master boot record and boot sector as well as partitions copied.

Both drives must be present at the same time for this process and often fails if there are too many errors on drive A so it is a good idea to cleanup and run check disk first.

I call this process cloning as you can replace the A drive with the B drive in a PC and just carry on as before.

Imaging

This process is more complicated as you do not necessarily have to have both drives present at the same time.

The imaging program creates an 'image' of the drive or partition to be copied, perhaps on another hard drive, perhaps on DVD.

This image can be stored either as a proprietary file (eg Ghost, PE) or as a byte for byte copy as in cloning.

Either way the imaging (restoring) program uses the stored image to write a new partition to the B drive and some are clever enough to also write new MBR and Bootsector, and even change the Windows key by some automated script. This is how OEM's place Windows on a new pc from one master copy - they don't 'Install' they 'Image' and your copy of Windows if you have the foresight to buy the CD is still shrink-wrapped although your licence key is different from any other.

Hope this helps

 

Hi Halo,
Glad to know that check image is the same as verifying. I do have the link of the manual but some sections of the manual are sometimes way over my head. :confused I'm "only" a senior (in age). Thank you!!