I have been using Macrium Reflect for backing up my system - using the IMAGING option. But I was curious, if you IMAGE the entire drive, isn't that essentially the same as CLONING? What is the difference if this is not the case?
Cloning usually means copying the contents of a partition ( or several partitions) directly to another storage device.
e.g. get a bigger or faster disk, clone the old disk to it. Then boot up the new disk.
Could be described as a direct copy:
source > target
Imaging usually means copying the contents of a partition ( or several partitions ) to an image file. Typically the image file can later be restored either to the source location to fix a damaged os , or to a new disk.
Could be described as indirect copy:
source > image file > target
Ah thank you. So the "image" is used when you are putting the same info back on the same partitioned disk? Is that correct?
... putting the same info back on the same partitioned disk? [from netrate comment above]
Not quite, it's actually more flexible than that.
One can restore a Macrium Reflect image file to another larger/smaller disk, even to another external disk. The programme will dynamically resize the partition as you instruct it to at the start of the restore process. There is graphical representation to do this easily. This is also true of the other popular freeware backup/restore programme Aomei Backupper. The only, and obvious, limitation on restoring to a smaller disk is that the capacity of the smaller disk must still be as large or larger than the size of the operating system being restored (resultant lack of any free space makes this totally impractical, of course).
All Restore operations to the C Drive (ie. the active drive) must be done from an external boot. I use an external USB boot drive but Macrium (and Aomei) will reboot into external mode of itself when directed to. And a very nice touch with Macrium is that from the external boot, Macrium offers a menu choice of repairing C Drive boot failure from any restored image - I've used that quite a few times, it's a soul saver.
Both clones and images are similar, but they operate at a rather different level logically.
A clone is pretty much a bit-by-bit copy of a chunk of data without any regard for its structure. It just copies the whole partition as-is without looking at it and creates an exact duplicate. It's most often used to move whole systems to a new hard disk.
An image is similar, but somewhat more inteligent process that takes into account the file system and its state. It copies the whole partition as well but it uses the file system information to copy only actual files and not the whole data, for example omiting unused space and without replicating symlinks and junctions.
Neither is a proper backup solution, although it can be used as such in some limited situations.
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