Solved Replacing HDD - Need Plan and Backup Plan plus software

[Lottiemansion]

Hi,

For your clarity: -

An image of a disc is just that "A file copy that can be used to clone a drive". To clone a drive is a "Direct disc to disc copy of the original".

So you can directly clone a drive to another drive or create a file to create a cloned copy of the drive later.

OK?

 

[AndyTampa]

Hi,

For your clarity: -

An image of a disc is just that "A file copy that can be used to clone a drive". To clone a drive is a "Direct disc to disc copy of the original".

So you can directly clone a drive to another drive or create a file to create a cloned copy of the drive later.

OK?

Got it. So they are both sort of the same. The difference can be described as both the destination and the format.

Can you clone or image a disk with multiple partitions to a new disk of a different size that has yet to be partitioned?

 

[Lottiemansion]

Hi,

Well yes but you would need to be careful.....

I would first image the drive (To preserve the data).

Then use the image to partition the new drive.

If I did it directly, I would partition the drive with each part slightly bigger than the original & then use that as a reference for each destination.

 

[wither 3]

Does this help-

Disk cloning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[AndyTampa]

Does this help-

Disk cloning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Too........much.........information.......Head........exploding


I understood the difference between an image file and cloning a disk to another disk. But this page, which links to more information, which links to more information just creates confusion, then a headache, then a nap to get rid of the headache, followed by trying to understand it again and a loop of the same cycle. To make matters worse, I found this statement "Additionally, if they do not support Windows Vista, they may slightly move or realign partitions and thus make Vista unbootable."

There are comparison lists of cloning software and of image software, but I'm not finding the answers I'm looking for in the comparisons. They list information I hadn't considered and don't know if I need to know such as 'Modifies', 'Mounts', 'Restores', 'Extracts', 'Input' type, 'Output' type, 'License' types (GPL/Shareware/Freeware/Freemium/GPL v2, LPGL, BSD, and others), 'Hot Transfer', 'HFS+', 'Client-server', and others.

Surely, someone must have done this stuff before, but I guess they're not monitoring the forum. I really appreciate the help of those that do.

 

[AndyTampa]

I would first image the drive (To preserve the data).

Then use the image to partition the new drive.

If I did it directly, I would partition the drive with each part slightly bigger than the original & then use that as a reference for each destination.

Use the image to partition the new drive?

If you did it directly?

I'm not sure what those statements mean.

 

[Lottiemansion]

Hi,

Create an image file & then use that as the source to create a "Replica or clone" of the drive. All this is done with the software that created the file. Like an OEM recovery.

OR

Use the software to create a clone of the drive in one action, no file is created but the disk is cloned directly with all the partition details copied too.

If the software is up to the job, it can resize the partitions (Bigger) on a larger drive too?

OK?

 

[AndyTampa]

OK?

Umm. No, not really. Between this and some personal stuff, I've gotta come back to this to try to understand it. I've gotta get the personal stuff out of the way first.

 

[AndyTampa]

Due to a recent explosion on my graphics card, I spent a lot of time deciphering what to use to protect my system. While I don't completely understand it, I bit the bullet and bought Acronis True Image for 3 PCs. As I understand it, ATI will create images of my computers. I also bought My Cloud which includes backup software. I believe I can set both of them to perform regular backups and images, which is what I was looking to do.

Thanks to everybody that tried to help me. And LottieMansion? I understand now what you were saying.