On Wed, 21 May 2014 19:49:46 -0500, BillW50 wrote:

Sorry about the double spacing in the previous post, reposted.

In ,
Gene E. Bloch typed:
On Wed, 21 May 2014 19:07:14 -0500, BillW50 wrote:

In ,
Gene E. Bloch typed:
On Wed, 21 May 2014 16:36:27 -0500, BillW50 wrote:

In ,
Char Jackson typed:
On Wed, 21 May 2014 03:49:34 -0400, AlDrake
wrote:

So in the long run none of these backup applications are even
worth the money, time and trouble I guess. But that all part of
who I am. I have shelves of toys I never use after unwrapping
them.

When you clone your drive(s), you need an additional drive for
every drive you wish to clone, or simply an additional drive for
every clone you wish to make. For many people, that gets
expensive. When you create a backup, you can typically put
multiple backups on a single drive.

Actually it should be cheaper the first time around. As a backup
drive will hold more than one backup I assume (otherwise you might
as well clone). So it has to be larger than the original drive and
that costs more. Sure the three drives you clone you might be
breaking even vs. a one backup drive.

Images are smaller than the whole drive. They are even smaller than
the used portion of the drive, if as is typical you use compression.

SNIP since I have no further comments.

True, but even if you take a 120GB drive and backup to an external
and say you get a 60GB saved compressed backup. Which is probably
very typical. Now how do you know you can restore? Are you going to
test it? Or are you going to hope it works? If you test it, are you
going to use the original drive? If so and it fails to boot, now
what? Bad idea eh? So you really need a spare drive to test it,
don't you? So if you need a spare drive to test, you could have
saved lots of time, money and trouble just cloning to the spare
drive anyway.

Obviously you could test dozens of different images on one and the
same spare drive, if all you're doing is making sure they are in fact
restorable.

You only need to devote a drive to a single image if you are in fact
restoring the image to that drive because the original drive is
defunct. But that's the way it would be under any plan, no?

Yes absolutely! Although are you going to test every single backup? If
so, that is twice the work than cloning. If you test less, well then it
is less work for sure. You still have the problem that you are trusting
one backup drive to stay working and not ever corrupting anything. For
me, that is a big if!

Where did I say that there will be only one drive for the backups? What
I said was that imaging allows backups from several drives to exist on a
single drive. If you get three backups on one drive, you'd only need two
drives to duplicate three backups. If you cloned, you'd need six.

I always duplicate my backups...just not often enough.

And everyone who suggests testing suggests testing every backup anyway.

Also, a clone needs to be tested too. Even a supposed exact copy could
end up being inexact.

I do have some machines that it isn't practical to swap drives. One of
them has a 4GB SSD soldered on the motherboard. So I am stuck using
backup/restore. But guess what? I can't trust one backup/restore
program, I use three different backup programs using three different
backup drives. I can't throw in a spare SSD, so I have to restore to the
original. So maybe one might fail to restore, maybe the second might
fail, but I hope the third will never fail. Otherwise that one gets a
factory reset.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)