Windows 7: Macrium Reflect - Cloning and Imaging?

Hi all,



couple of days ago I had some difficulties with my SR not working which caused me a huge time waste of re-installation of windows. then I came here and you guys suggested me to use macrium and now I'm very happy with it. at this very moment I should be thankful to WHS, ignatzatsonic, jumanji especialy.

and here is my problem I came up with, maybe a dumb one but I had to ask this because I wanna know exactly.

In the Macrium reflect main window, when I select a drive or partition, there's two options, one is clone this disk... and other one is image this disk... I only used imaging and tested it and working perfectly also with a winPE disk. but curious about this other option too. can somebody explain or direct me somewhere its being explained clearly. I have attached a screen capture and marked with arrows about the options. thank you.

cloning makes an exact bit-for-bit copy onto another drive, whereas imaging makes a compressed image file that you save away somewhere.

so, with cloning you end up with another drive containing the exact same files and folder structure, and with imaging, you end up with one big image file that can be used to make a copy in the future.

use cloning if you buy a new drive and want to copy the old one onto it, use imaging to save a backup.

hope that explains it, if not, let me know!

thank you mickey megabyte. yes it does. rep +.
about the cloning..where would it allocate space for that new drive? does it have to be pre defined by me?

Cloning is not usually thought of as a backup and restore method. It's normally used when things are fine and you want to move to a new larger hard drive. It's done in real time, without an intervening image file. You install the new drive and "clone" from the older one while you watch--it takes less than a half hour typically.

Imaging is a backup and restore strategy that is normally used when you find yourself in a jam of some type and want to "restore" to an earlier point in time. You make the image file in anticipation of the time when you will be in a jam, storing it on another drive. And restore it when and if needed.

Thank you ignatzatsonic. I got it.