Cloning your entire source drive

[Anna]

I think Bill likes the idea that his clone is a snapshot of the system
taken
all at the same time, whereas a clone which includes incremental changes
along the way is a clone of the system at the time of the last backup -
which
could have been 2 minutes ago. If Bill discovers that a file was
corrupted
or lost last week sometime, he knows that a clone made earlier than that
would contain the file as it was at that earlier time. So Bill is simply
"archiving"
rather than backing up for a hard drive crash.

*TimDaniels*

Well, you may very well be right. If Bill (or any user) is primarily or
exclusively interested in maintaining "generational" copies of his/her
system then it is true that generally speaking a disk-imaging program lends
itself better to that process than a disk-cloning program.
Anna

 

[Bill in Co.]

I think Bill likes the idea that his clone is a snapshot of the system
taken all at the same time, whereas a clone which includes incremental
changes
along the way is a clone of the system at the time of the last backup -
which
could have been 2 minutes ago. If Bill discovers that a file was
corrupted
or lost last week sometime, he knows that a clone made earlier than that
would contain the file as it was at that earlier time. So Bill is simply
"archiving" rather than backing up for a hard drive crash.

*TimDaniels*

That's correct, and you did a better job of explaining it than I did. So
thanks, Tim.

 

[Bill in Co.]

Well, you may very well be right. If Bill (or any user) is primarily or
exclusively interested in maintaining "generational" copies of his/her
system then it is true that generally speaking a disk-imaging program
lends
itself better to that process than a disk-cloning program.
Anna

That is indeed primarily what I am interested in doing, Anna.
I've done several tests of some various software packages just for my own
interest, and fairly often find myself relying on these generational backup
*images* to restore back to a clean system prior to those tests, just to be
sure everything is "kosh".

 

[Anna]

That is indeed primarily what I am interested in doing, Anna.
I've done several tests of some various software packages just for my own
interest, and fairly often find myself relying on these generational
backup *images* to restore back to a clean system prior to those tests,
just to be sure everything is "kosh".

Bill:
That's understandable. Many users, especially commercial entities, desire to
maintain "generational" copies of their systems at particular
points-in-time. In my experience, however, with the great majority of PC
home users, there is no need nor desire for that capability. Most of these
users simply need to maintain a current comprehensive backup of their
system.

It is possible, of course, to use a disk-cloning program such as the Casper
one we've been discussing to create & maintain these generational-type
clones. It would be practical only if the amount of data being cloned at any
given time is not particularly enormous in size and the user's "destination"
HDD would be sufficient in disk-space to house the cloned contents of each
"generation".

However this would dilute what we consider to be Casper's main advantage,
i.e., its "incremental clone" capability, since each "generational" clone
thus created would be by definition a *new* clone; therefore Casper's
inherent advantage re its "SmartClone technology" would not be a factor re
the disk-cloning process.

So all-in-all it's usually more advantageous for a user to employ the
disk-imaging process when creating & maintaining multiple comprehensive
backups over various points-in-time.
Anna