imaging

Larry just built a new gaming computer. Now he wants to restore a backup so he doesn't have to install all his programs that are on his old computer. His options are to either clone or restore from a backup. What's the difference? Leo says that a cloned drive is an image of the hard drive which can then be blasted back onto a drive. But that's not a good option for cloud backup. Good for a local backup on an external drive. Microsoft stores cloning in the legacy backup settings.

Other imaging options include:

Clonezilla

Ed wants to be able to take a snapshot of his Mac hard drive and use it as a backup, but still have a backup on the same drive. Will SuperDuper do that? Leo says it's called an Image, or Ghost. Some may be able to do that, but SuperDuper isn't one because it takes up the entire drive so he can use the image as a bootable drive. Leo recommends Carbon Copy Cloner or ChronoSync. Both will match folders, but not the entire drive. He can also image the hard drive using macOS disk utility onto a backup drive. 

Joe wants to clone his current hard drive to a smaller hard drive, but Acronis True Image says that you can't do it. Leo says to look in the software settings to avoid matching the size of the original hard drive. Just make a copy. That could be the issue. 

Leo also uses DriveImage by Runtime.org. Try that one. 

Bill wants to know how to back up his programs when he backs up his data. Leo says don't. It's problematic and rather difficult to do that, plus it'll take up a lot of space. What Leo recommends is to image the drive and use that as a backup. He can then blast it back onto the hard drive whenever he needs. Here are a few imaging programs to try:

Clonezilla

EaseUS

Drive Snapshot

John has an iMac and he wants to be able to make a bootable image. For the Mac, Leo uses SuperDuper for that purpose. For free, there's also EaseUS. Here's a complete list:

Imaging options -

Clonezilla

Drive Snapshot

Bird has 15 Macs at work that he has to set up. He wants to know if he can do a net install to create a setup when connecting the Mac to the network? Leo says that Apple has a Net Install option through the System Image Utility. It's a simple google search. There's also a company called JAMPH that can do it for you. They are the leaders in network Mac management.

Matthew uses Skype and says that the Chrome Helper Agent may also cause sync problems when using Skype video. So he dumped it for Firefox. 

Steven wants to know if it's better to image a drive or make a backup of everything. Leo says that imaging a drive makes for a quick reinstall that he can put back onto the hard drive quickly. But it's frozen in time and goes out of date quickly. That's where an incremental file backup comes in handy. Leo uses both and recommends that. 

Jason bought a new HP laptop and wants to know how he can back it up while it's still pristine. Leo says he can create an image using imaging software and save it to a USB key.
Imaging options: