[drk52]

Hi, I'm kinda new to hdclone (although I did used 3.7.4 freeware for awhile. I'm getting a new PC with an ssd for the main C drive. (and windows 10). I would like to get a clone of the ssd before I start using it so it can be restored if I have a future issue. Problem: If I do a sector by sector (physical) backup it will probably be unnecessarily huge. (unless it may be partitioned) and even just windows 10 may be very large. I'm looking for good suggestions as to how to best backup this system SSD for a future disaster type restore. Disaster being like a drive virus/corruption/drive failure... etc. What size USB drive would I need? Or should it go to a SATA hard drive?

Any suggestions??

[drk52]

Hi, It's me again,
What I'm asking is: What is te best way to backup a new Windows 10 system disk if it is on an SSD? What size USB backup drive is required, and what options and/or release/version of HDCLONE should I use? I would definitely like it to be a HDCLONE/S so it can be restored when windows is out of commision.

Any help?

[Alex]

Using the Free Edition, the image will always be huge.
If you make an image from a 10 GB disk, the image will be 10GB. If you make it from a 100GB disk, the image will be 100GB etc.
Any of the HDClone images will suffice, the only difference will be the size.

Using HDClone Standard Edition (or any higher edition), the image will be only the size of the used data, regardless of the disk size.

It doesn’t matter what settings you choose when making the image (except for the case where you don’t backup everything needed – with higher editions, you can leave out partitions or single files). When restoring such an image, there are a few options that can be tweaked and that may affect the bootabilty of the system, e.g. - change disk signature, - change volume ids, - adjust drivers, - align partitions
all these are not necessary if you restore the image back to the same system and the same disk, and these settings are also set up in a default way they do the least possible changes.

Only if you make e.g. a restore to a new (larger or smaller) disk, or to a disk for a different computer, then you should enable some of these restore options.

[drk52]

Thanks Alex for the reply. Yea, that's what I was worried about--the size of the output drive. I should have included that this SSD is a 512 Gig, and WAY to large to backup with just the freeware version which only does the physical (sector by sector) backup/restore.

So then, I will definitely be getting the Standard Edition to do backups. Looks like you've been on the HDCLONE team for awhile, and like I say, it will be for a disaster recovery of the system (bootable) drive. Given that, what backup options would you suggest to make this a bootable drive restore as an exact copy of the backed up drive, while also minimizing the backup drive space?

This will be a brand new windows 10 system drive--whatever size a windows 10 system is. So, what would you guess would be a good guess for the size of a USB backup drive to be backed-up to? I've heard about 6 gig--Does that sound reasonable?

Also, a kinda different question--I noticed that the HDCLONE/S bootable system has gotten a LOT larger than the early releases.
Can I do anything to decrease the size of the HDCLONE/S bootable system?

And thanks Alex for your support.

[Alex]

About what size the USB drive for the backup should get: it really depends

- a fresh windows installation is typically a few dozen GB in size, but when there are user files, after a year or so, disks tend to fill up. So if you have a 512 GB system disk, eventually your system will be short of ~512GB (a few GB should always remain free to give the applications some room to "breathe")

HDClone will compress the data, so you typically end up with 50-70% of the original size.

But when you’re making multiple backups and say keep the last two or three, you can see what size the backup medium probably should have.

In the Advanced Edition there is also now a feature called "Differential Backup", which makes the 2nd/3rd/4th backup of the same disk considerably smaller, as long as you have the original image, as only the differences to that initial backup are stored. The time to create the image remains the same, as the entire source has to be read, compared to the image, and then only the differences get stored, so the amount of reading to do is the same. Ok, you save some writing time, so it should be faster....



About the size of HDClone/S getting larger and larger: that’s because more stuff is contained: new apps for Cloning/Backing up etc, but most importantly, now a 64 and a 32 bit version of HDClone is included, each clocking in at about 30-40MB.