Macrium Reflect

mjf · 31 Aug 2011

strollin said:

mjf said:

strollin said:

If you get the paid version of Macrium it can clone an existing drive to new drive.

The word "clone" has a lot to answer for. Why clone when you can do the job faster and much more efficiently with imaging.

Image and restore is a 2 step process whereas clone is a 1 step process. How is a 2 step process faster and more efficient? Why do you think the clone option is only provided in the paid version of MR? Could it be a desired feature that some people are willing to pay for?

CLONING in my opinion
Pros:
1) "Simple" one step process. How often do you clone though?
2) People want it - why? Maybe marketing hype - Nice anthropomorhic name - gee it must be complex and pretty smart. It's actually just (generally) dumb bit copying.
Cons:
1) Need a full HDD of at least equal size to hold the clone. Blind copy rubbish and all.
2) Images are much smaller and many can be stored on cheap external HDDs.
3) Every appropriate image can make a new HDD. Same end result as a clone.
This allows greater flexibility.
4) Two step process but probably faster for moderate to large drives.

Edit: Cloning is free in the new Easeus V3 software. Also, the free Acronis for Seagate & WD.

strollin · 31 Aug 2011

Both cloning and imaging have their place. Cloning is most useful when upgrading from a working drive to a new (almost always larger) drive. Imaging is best for backups.

However, there is no way that imaging and restoring is faster than cloning. The clone and image will take about the same amount of time to do but in the case of cloning you are then done. In order to restore from that image you will either need to start the restore process from Windows which forces a reboot into DOS or Linux -or- you need to boot from a "rescue" disk. The restore then takes about the same time as imaging or cloning so at best it takes about twice as long.

Images are smaller because they are compressed but the same number of bits need to be read from the disk to image and same number of bits need to be written to the disk to restore.

mjf · 31 Aug 2011

If you want to clone of course that's an option some choose. Even from a working disk I choose imaging. It's simple and fast.
I don't know the answer to this one - if you cloned say a 1TB single partition disk does your cloning software read then write every byte of the 1TB as I thought it did? If so, that would have to be slow wouldn't it?