If your laptop or desktop allows for two drives, you’re in luck-you can proceed with a direct transfer from one to the other.
The only problem is, you’d miss any changes you made since carrying out the clone-but with that caveat, reverting to the destination drive allows you to pick up where you left off. With cloning, if something disastrous happens to your source drive, you can revert to the destination drive. In other words, it’s the process of creating an exact replica of a drive so you can’t detect a difference between the source drive and the destination drive. To begin, let’s start by defining both cloning and imaging.Ĭloning is the one-to-one transfer of the entire contents of a hard drive to another hard drive. imaging? Which option is better for managed services providers (MSPs)? Defining cloning and imaging So, given all these commonalities, what are the differences between cloning vs. In short, they replicate everything you need to boot and run an operating system-which is why you can’t boot from a simple file-only backup. Imaging and cloning do involve the replication of files-but they also replicate boot and partition information, the allocation table, and additional data used by the operating system to locate and access the replicated files.
However, it’s important to note neither involves simply copying and pasting data onto another drive. And you can use both to back up a drive or replace an old, corrupted, or failed drive with a new-hopefully faster and larger-one. Both create an exact or near exact record of your drive. For the most part, this confusion is warranted-both are information technology tactics for copying the complete content of a hard drive. Whenever there’s discussion about the difference between a clone and an image, confusion between the two terms abounds.