Richard Christensen
asked on
Cloning a hard drive using Casper?
I had this question after watching Cloning a Hard Drive with Casper.
Excellent tutorial Joe. I have one question. Since you are cloning your main hard drive over to this external drive on a frequent basis is it true that each clone will wipe out anything (including the previous clone) on that external drive in order to produce a new and up to date clone?
Thanks,
capreol
Excellent tutorial Joe. I have one question. Since you are cloning your main hard drive over to this external drive on a frequent basis is it true that each clone will wipe out anything (including the previous clone) on that external drive in order to produce a new and up to date clone?
Thanks,
capreol
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
That sounds like a good backup plan to me.
ASKER
Thanks a lot for your help. Much appreciated.
Capreol
Capreol
You're welcome!
ASKER
Very good answer. Thanks a lot.
Capreol
Capreol
Hi Capreol,
I want you to know that I was not notified when you submitted this question at the video. I don't want you to think that I was being unresponsive. I have submitted a bug report on this to EE, as I think the authors of video Micro Tutorials should be notified when a question is asked:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/bugs/9825/Authors-of-video-Micro-Tutorials-are-not-notified-when-a-question-is-asked.html
That said, I'm glad that another EE member addressed your question, although I don't agree with everything that Tuan said. He is right that a clone overwrites the entire drive, but I do not think that "a full clone every night would be a bit overkill". It really depends on how much time you want to be down when you have to recover. I prefer the idea of installing a cloned drive into the machine where the drive failed and being back up and running in literally a few minutes. It has happened to me! So even for a 500GB drive, Tuan's comment that "an incremental backup would be better" needs some provisos — there are pros and cons.
Of course, in addition to cloning, Casper (and Acronis) can create images, allowing you to store a backup of the complete drive in a single file in the file system (such as on a NAS or a high capacity, external USB drive), but unlike a clone, restoration of an image to create a working machine is not a simple matter of installing the cloned drive.
Re the question, "I'm sure Casper has the ability to do incremental backups right?", the answer is yes (for images, of course, not clones):
Regards, Joe
I want you to know that I was not notified when you submitted this question at the video. I don't want you to think that I was being unresponsive. I have submitted a bug report on this to EE, as I think the authors of video Micro Tutorials should be notified when a question is asked:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/bugs/9825/Authors-of-video-Micro-Tutorials-are-not-notified-when-a-question-is-asked.html
That said, I'm glad that another EE member addressed your question, although I don't agree with everything that Tuan said. He is right that a clone overwrites the entire drive, but I do not think that "a full clone every night would be a bit overkill". It really depends on how much time you want to be down when you have to recover. I prefer the idea of installing a cloned drive into the machine where the drive failed and being back up and running in literally a few minutes. It has happened to me! So even for a 500GB drive, Tuan's comment that "an incremental backup would be better" needs some provisos — there are pros and cons.
Of course, in addition to cloning, Casper (and Acronis) can create images, allowing you to store a backup of the complete drive in a single file in the file system (such as on a NAS or a high capacity, external USB drive), but unlike a clone, restoration of an image to create a working machine is not a simple matter of installing the cloned drive.
Re the question, "I'm sure Casper has the ability to do incremental backups right?", the answer is yes (for images, of course, not clones):
Regards, Joe
ASKER
thanks,
Capreol