"Anna" wrote in message
...

Please keep in mind that the drive letter
assignments on
the *external* (destination) HDD are of *no*
relevance
should the time come when the user would want
to restore
his/her system from the contents of the
destination
drive. Obviously should the user desire to
restore their
system to its previous state, they would simply
clone
the contents of (in our example) the first
three
partitions on the destination HDD back to their
internal
(source) HDD. (I mention this because it seems
there is
some confusion over this point among some
users.)

We all know this is some kind of sticking point
for Bill!
So, out of curiosity, if one clones the contents
of the
clone back to the PC's hard drive, will the
drive letter
assignments be as they were (I'm talking about
how they
were on the PC's hard drive originally before
*any*
cloning took place)?

IFF it's a true "clone", then yes. I've seen the
definition of the word being rather *******ized,
apparently for convenience or hype by the program
makers. Or possibly language translations. The
word "clone" has suffered some serious dilution in
the past decade; in some instances it's turning
out to be nothing but a copy which is not the
intent of cloning a physical drive.
Cloning is to make the cloned disk data be
exactly like the original, with NO differences
whatsoever other than possible some extra space
left over if it's a larger physical drive.
The data that was in sector 1 of the original
gets put to sector 1 of the clone, 2 to 2, 3 to 3,
and so on to the end of the operation and the
physical drive. Anything that was NOT on the
original can not, by definition, be on the clone,
or it would not have made a clone. ALL existying
data on the device being cloned TO is gone,
period, never to be seen again.
Should pre-existing data on the drive being
cloned TO still be there after the "clone", then a
true "clone" was not accomplished; it was instead
an image of the original drive, and entirely
different animal. AFAIK anyway; I don't see why a
clone couldn't leave data in unneeded areas in
tack, if its location didn't ovelap with any
locations the cloned data needs, but ... I havent'
seen such an animal. Mainly because the actual
physical locations of partitions on a drive aren't
reliable, I suppose.
I don't know whether Acronis does a true clone
or not. I know Ghost does, because the MFT, MBR,
etc. are all part of the data transfered and of
course, must reside in the proper places on the
disk drive to be usable. Also AFAIK clones can
not be compressed while images of course can be,
and there is no such thing as an incremental clone
as there is for imaging or other types of backups.
Cloning operations go right down to the
head/platter/track/sector level where imaging
leaves that to the operating system which is why
images require VSS in order to image a system
drive while the system is running.

HTH

Twayne