- EaseUS Freeware
- Free Data Recovery Software
- Free Backup Software
- Free Partition Manager
Updated on 2017-11-06
This article applies to:
All EaseUS Todo Backup editions
Description
Since disk/partition backup and clone options can be both used to operate an entire hard drive or create a system drive copy, most users are confused which one is better for a specific purpose (system backup, system migration and others). This article offers the suggestions when to use them based on the explanation of the difference between the 2 options.
Compare between the 2 options
After a backup process, files and partitions on selected destination hard drive will be not affected except for an .PBD image file created, recover/extract the image file can bring everything on source hard drive/partition back to an earlier time.
A PBD image file created after backup:
While clone is used to build a new identical hard drive. All contents on destination hard drive will be replaced with staffs from source hard drive. Nothing more is required before you can use the new hard drive.
There will be 2 hard drives containing exact same content after the clone process:
For a long run system/data protection job, backup is supposed to be used due to the advantages below:
1. Backup can be scheduled (e.g. regular automatic backups that requires no further user interaction);
2. Backup changes can be appended incrementally or differentially (i.e. after a full backup, subsequent backups will take less time and occupy less space than the first one);
3. Backups allow you to keep several versions of the backed up data and you can restore to one of the previous versions (e.g. you can keep backups from one, two and three weeks ago on the same disk and you can recover the backup from the moment that you need);
4. Backup can be mounted and searched through (e.g. if you want to quickly find, view and copy a file from it).
User can easily get system running again after recovering a system image file to original drive even a new drive.
For transferring system to another machine, user have to use Recover System to dissimilar hardware because of new driver file required.
When to use clone
Disk clone is a one time operation designed to clone one disk to a different one for the purpose of migrating to a larger hard drive on the same machine. So compare to backup, clone is more suitable for replacing system drive with a new HDD or a more efficient SSD.
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