On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:34:55 -0500, "Patrick
Keenan"
wrote:


"John D99" wrote in message
m...
I've got Acronis True Image 9.

I want to backup my standalone's o/s to a
diferent physical
harddrive on the machine, with the priority
being on simplicty and
actually being able to re-install when the o/s
goes bad, or won't
boot, a year or two from now. The o/s is only
about 7 gigs, and
I've got lots of space, so that's not an
issue.

I have looked over the Acronis material, and
even used their online
chat to ask about a straightforward way of
doing it, without really
coming away with anything I want to operate
on.

Can anybody give me a few streps and some
overview info on this?
Clone versus image?

Cloning is for duplicating the disk, to
another disk you have
ready. You want an image, to store for later.

Why? You can do an updated clone in a few
minutes and be bootable.

Patrick,

About Wally's response:

A clone is a full backup and stands alone. As
such, it can not be added to, in the sense of
incremental backups. An image starts with a full
backup and then, instead of wasting all the space
that full backups cost, only has to do
incrementals, meaning only backing up the files
that have changed, and adding them to the image.

Disk Cloning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning

Disk Imaging:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_image

"Clone" and "Image" meanings have become seriously
*******ized over the years and people, even some
who should know better, tend to use them
interchangeably. Depending on which dictionary
definition you wish to use, they could be
interchangeable in some ways. In general,
consider:

Clone = a way to copy an entire, whole, bootable
disk in one pass. There is no futzing with
individual files or folders, and no way to do so.
During a restore from a Clone, all you can do is
the whole thing. What previously sat on sector
99, for instance, will be returned to sector 99,
199 to 199, and so on.

Image = a way to back up any drive, folder, file
or combination of them, for use and restorating at
any time. It MIGHT be able to do the same thing
as a clone can, but it also does much more and
allows a lot more capabilities. Sort of an image
or picture record of the drive at any particular
time.

Nearly all IMAGING programs will also allow you to
CLONE a drive. But a specific CLONE program
usually will not include this same kind of IMAGE
capability.

There are a lot of nuances and other
things/similarities/differences one could go into,
but that should work OK for a layman's
description, I think.

Maybe it's just me, but I've never heard of an
"updated clone". A clone is a clone. You might
update an image in a few minutes, but ... that's
not the same thing as creating a clone. A true
Clone cannot be "updated"; it must be created each
time. Each clone is equivalent to a disk's worth
if data and so takes up a lot of space. Where a
full image and incremental images thereafter,
takes a LOT less space for the same amount of
data. And, just to keep things accurate, there
are two sides to it: Backing up and then
Restoring from backup, plus cloning if/when one
purchases a new disk drive..

Even if an incremental only takes a few minutes,
it's still going to require the half hour to
whatever, depending on how much data has to be
restored, for the Restore process. Right now a
Restore of my system drive requires about 23
minutes and if it's a new disk or one that is
being repaired from an unbootable state, add to
that time whatever it takes to put the bootable CD
into the drive, tell it where your backup images
are, and get everything initiated. That's around
a half hour for my system disk, should i have a
catastrophic failure and need to use the ISO
created emergency boot CD.
Additionally, almost any hard drive you
purchase today comes with or has available, a
cloning program provided by the manufacturer to
help you get the data from the old drive moved
over onto the new drive. It's standard operating
procedure for them and mostly automated so it only
requires a few key clicks since it's a specialized
function.

HTH a little,

Twayne




-pk

How to for a boot disk.. what to do when a
failure happens, etc.

Thnx