functions/details on hd clones and images?

[ihatepcproblems2013]

Details:
About making clone and image, can someone tell me how long the processes contrasting the two? Say 600 gbs hard drive. How long does restoring 600 gb image take? And how much storage space 600 gb hard drive image take up? How do you restore image, do you need the developer app you made image with to restore?
Functions:

The advantage of image/clone seem apparent. Would you agree these are the best backup technologies thus far? It seem a big time saver in sense of just picking up where you left off say you got 10 app on hd and not having to reinstall them again.

However I still got some security questions. Say you got a 600gb image on a pervious 1tb hd, would that image adapt easily to a bigger hd without problem? say 2tb,3tb,4tb and so on?
from casual research , I found out about the different image types: backup,raw,iso.
How long does 600 gb take to image on each type? Does backup image give you back normal ntfs? Or raw give you back raw so don’t pick that if you want a normal readable ntfs system?

 

[boosted1g]

First of all, I recommend a software called Macrium Reflect. They have free and paid versions but even their free one is pretty feature rich.
You can do scheduled full and/or incremental backups, keep only X number of backups in a folder, mount the old backup like a hard drive if say you only need to recover a few files.
If you have a full failure on the machine with the backups on it you would use a boot cd that you can create once you setup the software.

If say this is for backups of multiple PCs then I would suggest getting a $20 hot-swap enclosure for the backup server, and that way you can take the drive from whatever PC needs an image restored, pop it in the PC and run it from the full app. This is faster and easier.

As far as drive sizes, as long as the destination drive is bigger then the image it is no problem.

As far as disk space: Windows creates different directories for pagefile, hibernation, etc that wont be backed up, add to that that most disk software backup using compression so thus a 50gb windows installation drive ends up being a 30-35GB disk image (the size of the disk is irrelevant, only how much data is on the drive). Now this is not a direct ratio so if say you had a drive with 250gb of data, best case scenario the image would be something like 200gb.

As far as time this depends on both drive performance and computer performance. I can tell you that restoring a 70GB windows image only takes a few minutes.

The backup image will give you back whatever it was before, permissions and all. It is a "photograph" of the 1s and 0s on the drive.

 

[ihatepcproblems2013]

First of all, I recommend a software called Macrium Reflect. They have free and paid versions but even their free one is pretty feature rich.
You can do scheduled full and/or incremental backups, keep only X number of backups in a folder, mount the old backup like a hard drive if say you only need to recover a few files.
If you have a full failure on the machine with the backups on it you would use a boot cd that you can create once you setup the software.

If say this is for backups of multiple PCs then I would suggest getting a $20 hot-swap enclosure for the backup server, and that way you can take the drive from whatever PC needs an image restored, pop it in the PC and run it from the full app. This is faster and easier.

As far as drive sizes, as long as the destination drive is bigger then the image it is no problem.

As far as disk space: Windows creates different directories for pagefile, hibernation, etc that wont be backed up, add to that that most disk software backup using compression so thus a 50gb windows installation drive ends up being a 30-35GB disk image (the size of the disk is irrelevant, only how much data is on the drive). Now this is not a direct ratio so if say you had a drive with 250gb of data, best case scenario the image would be something like 200gb.

As far as time this depends on both drive performance and computer performance. I can tell you that restoring a 70GB windows image only takes a few minutes.

The backup image will give you back whatever it was before, permissions and all. It is a "photograph" of the 1s and 0s on the drive.

how long does 600gb take to image? estimate? don;t want to enter a time commitment i can't keep.

 

[popatim]

usb 5-6 hours.
sata to sata - maybe 45 minutes depends on the drives speed though
sata to lan maybe 3hrs.

 

[ihatepcproblems2013]

usb 5-6 hours.
sata to sata - maybe 45 minutes depends on the drives speed though
sata to lan maybe 3hrs.

hmm ...usb can be so long for a big operation lik this.
sata significantly faster ...

does it make sense to set up my pc box to accomodate one free hd with an os to house images to restore from and the hd i want to image to hook up to that to get fastest time?

right now i have enough cables, sata power and data for 2 satas.

 

[boosted1g]

usb 5-6 hours.
sata to sata - maybe 45 minutes depends on the drives speed though
sata to lan maybe 3hrs.

How would sata to sata take 45 minutes for 600GB. Do the math that would require a speed of 222MBps which is twice the speed a typical 7200rmp hard drive can go.

USB: are we talking 2.0 or 3.0? 3.0 will max out the speed of the hard drive and will not bottleneck anything

Lan: if we are talking gigabit this will only limit the real world speed from the sata speed of around 100MBps down to around 90MBps. Now if doing WiFi, you are looking at 5-15MBps depending on your setup.

 

[boosted1g]

The speed of the backup is limited to the slowest part.
If you have two 7200rpm hard drives on sata (or usb 3.0) then the real world write speed will be around 100MBps. Thus doing the math that means it will take 1.7 hours, probably more likely around 2 hrs total time. Schedule it to run overnight and no big deal at all.


Now with all of that said, what is on that drive for it to have 600GB on it?
Ideally what you should have is OS drive, Storage Drive and Backup Drive.
OS has your operating system, programs, and day to day things on it. Storage drive has whatever it is that is eating up that much space (movies, pictures, or other data). Backup drive then has a file backup of the Storage drive with shadow copy/versioning on data that is not movies (this means it will hold onto previous versions of a file in case of accidental deletion/modification/corruption), and then the backup drive also has disk images of the OS drive.

FYI, if you are limited on physical space for hard drives, you can always partition the OS drive to have a partition for OS/Programs/Documents/User Files, and a separate partition for that bulk data.