Disk imaging and disk cloning are the two popular ways to take a data backup in an organization. These are old technologies that have been used by IT professionals for more than twenty years.
In a few companies, cloning is replaced by disk imaging. To decide the best one for data backup, you need to understand the pros and cons of both technologies.
www.disk-image-backup.com is the leading place online that provides a drive image backup tool to create snapshots of your vital data. In this way, it helps to keep the precious data and OS configurational settings secure and safe at all the time. This is a good way to safeguard valuable data and easily restore it whenever required.
What is Disk Imaging?
Imaging forms a large-sized compressed file of the hard drive of your system. You can restore this image file to bring the hard drive to normal working condition. As the image file are bulky, they are often stored in the cloud or an external drive.
What is Disk Cloning?
Cloning is a method that forms a precise and uncompressed replica of the hard disk drive. So, if your hard drive malfunctions, then you can replace it with the cloned one. The advantage of this method is that it helps you restore the system state quickly. However, it fails to deliver the level of flexibility that is provided by disk imaging.
Which Is Better – Disk Imaging or Disk Cloning?
Disk imaging is preferred over cloning as it provides a greater level of flexibility to the user. With this method, you can take a consistent and reliable backup of your PC. The advantage of disk cloning is that it provides you greater convenience and speed to copy and move the data from the current hard drive to the new one.
As you can quickly replace the damaged hard drive with a cloned one, it reduces downtime to a substantial extent. This could be the ideal choice when the company can’t afford to be without data access for a long period.
Where data cloning is ideal for quick recovery, disk imaging offers plenty of backup options to the user. Also, taking incremental backup snapshots provide the ability to save several images without requiring much space.
This is beneficial when you have accidentally downloaded a virus and wish to roll back the state of the hard drive to an earlier point or disk image. Cloning gives a single copy per hard disk drive.
Conclusion
Both disk imaging and cloning help create an accurate record of the hard drive. This comprises all the files present on the hard drives with the master boot record that your computer would need to boot in Windows. They are both highly powerful techniques to copy and recover data.
When choosing between disk imaging and disk cloning, the former method offers more benefits to the user. The imaging method allows remote storage of a disk image. Also due to compression of the image size, it takes less space on the web.