"J. P. Gilliver (John)" schreef in bericht
news
In message , Linea Recta
writes:
[]
BTW could you explain (briefly) the difference between cloning and
restoring a drive?
[]
Cloning: turning disc B into an exact copy of disc A. Involves two drives,
probably plus the drive (CD/DVD drive, USB stick, whatever) you booted the
cloning software from.

At its simplest, cloning software copies sector by sector from one drive
to another, regardless of whether they contain anything useful; though
most cloning software knows enough about how modern operating systems
(such as Windows) work, and only copies the sectors that contain required
data, unless you tell them otherwise.


Restoring: restoring a copy of a disc, from a backup you made earlier. The
backup could be a clone as above, but is more likely an _image_, which is
a _file_, containing details of the boot sector and one or more
partitions; an image file is not itself bootable. Restoring requires
(obviously) the drive you're restoring to, the drive the image is on
(which _could_ be e. g. a USB stick if big enough), and the drive you're
booting the restore software from.

Imaging software makes image files from the partitions (and even discs)
you tell it to; they're not unlike a giant ZIP file. Obviously, it knows
how to restore (unzip, if you like) these files later. Like cloning
software, modern imaging software knows enough about modern OSs to give
the option (usually the default) to only image the parts that had relevant
data on. They usually also offer compression, which makes the image file
even smaller, at the expense of some extra time while imaging and
restoring.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I am entitled to my own opinion."
"Yes, but it's your constant assumption that everyone else is also that's
so
annoying." - Vila & Avon




OK thanks. I have restored more than once (successfully), but never used the
"clone" option of Macrium yet.




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