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Difference between Backup and Disk Clone

difference between backup and disk clone

Difference backup & disk clone, Plenty of users get confused between disk backup and disk clone and are not sure exactly when to use one option or the other as both of them can be used for operating the whole hard drive or coming up with a system drive copy. It is important to know the specific nature of these options so that they can be used rightly when for instance a person may want to create system backup or work on system migration.

According to Webzguru, Learning the difference between the two can go hand in hand when it comes to using them in the most effective manner.

The backup process works in a different manner than the disk clone process. For instance, once the disk backup is carried out, the partitions and files present on the selected destination drive are not going to be affected. The process will lead to the creation of a.PBD image file. By choosing the recover/extract option, you can use the image file for bringing everything present on the source hard drive or partition as the way it was during an earlier time. On the other hand, the cloning process is used for building a wholly new identical disk drive. All the contents present on the destination hard drive can get replaced with data from the source hard drive. This means that nothing at all is needed before you can start to use this new hard drive.

Hard Drive As a Backup for a PC

Disk Backup & Disk Clone

It is important that you know when you specifically apply Disk Backup and when you use Disk Clone. When you are looking to do a data protection job or long-run system protection, backup is definitely the method of choice to be used. Here are the distinct advantages of using backup in such circumstances:

  • The backup process can be easily scheduled; for instance, regular automatic backups require no additional user interaction;
  • The backups also allow you to preserve multiple versions of backed-up data. You can also restore to any of the previously existing versions; for instance, you can store backups from one or several weeks ago simultaneously on the same disk; you can also recover a backup from any moment that you require;
  • The backup changes can also be incrementally or differentially appended; once a complete backup is carried out, subsequent backups are going to take much less time and also occupy less space compared to the first one;
  • Backup can be easily mounted and carefully searched through when you are looking to find, copy and view some files from it.
  • The users can get the system running again easily after recovering the system image file to the original or a new drive.

On the other hand, a disk clone works as a one-time operation that is designed for cloning one disk to some other disk for migrating the system to some hard drive with a larger capacity on the same machine. Compared to the backup method, the clone is ideally suitable for effectively replacing the system drive with a new HDD or SSD for more enhanced operations.

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