Normally, you would reinstall the Windows operating system along with all the programs that existed on your previous hard drive.
#Clone disk vs image disk upgrade#
In the event you find yourself running out of disk space, you decide to upgrade to a new flash drive from your old mechanical drive. Circumstance 1 – You Need To Backup Your Operating And Files On Multiple Systems Or, someone must have suggested either of these options to you. The thought of imaging or cloning HDD to SSD on either Windows 10 or Mac (depending on what you have) might have struck your mind. You can only have one clone on one drive at a time since cloning creates an exact copy of a hard drive.Ĭircumstances when each of these can be usedīest suited when creating multiple backups of your OS and encompassing filesīest suited when upgrading a hard drive or when you need a medium for fast recovery, for instance, when you have a hard drive that is failing. – Disk Cloning is comparatively less flexible. Incremental – this kind of backup takes into account any changes that have occurred since the last incremental image creation.Differential – this kind of backup takes into account any changes that have occurred ever since a full image was created.Full – as the name suggests, a backup of everything on your computer is taken.It lets you create/ schedule full, differential, and incremental bit by bite backups of your hard drive In a scenario, if your hard drive fails, you can use the cloned drive. – Creates an uncompressed exact replica of your drive. Now, since the image created is of large size, you need an external drive to store that image – It creates a compressed file (image) of your drive that is large in size. So, if you are running short on time and want to get a grasp of concepts, you can go through this table. In this table, we have differentiated both hard drive cloning and hard drive imaging in a more concise and digestible way.