What are Drive Imaging and Drive Cloning?

Drive imaging and cloning are powerful ways to back up your data - but what makes them better than just copying all your stuff onto a separate drive using File Explorer?

[pingpong]

As an IT professional, cloning and disk imaging has saved SO MUCH TIME

[josephobonyo]

He looks a loooot like the guy from Linus Tech Tips.

[LTT.Official]

Lots of free programs....doesn't mention even one.

[Ryzza]

Surprised this video isn't sponsored by a disk imaging software company.

Don't forget you can go to Control Panel - Backup and Restore - Create a System Image in Pro versions of Windows 7 to 10.

[uSeRTVMTA]

Bless Luke, Linus has made the main channel self absorbed and this is all he has left to present on. Prefer Luke in most cases, to see him get excited about building systems is brilliant and he breaks everything into more explainable content than Linus' messy not planned stuff

[remirms]

Maybe you should make a video on 'how to upgrade your harddrive to an ssd'. I haven't found a lot of step by step guides. It is especially very confusing when it comes to the software/cloning part. Just an idea.

[JustinDavis]

It becomes easier to wrap your head around if you consider that hard drives (and SSDs) are really just storing complex databases. When you are interacting with the hard drive, you are modifying the database using prescribed rules defined by the partitioning scheme and FS type. When you create an image of the hard drive, you are just reading block data from the disk and storing it in a sparse file (which can have empty space removed from it) for later use by mounting the file or writing the file to a new disk.

[rfldss]

automagically: when something is done automatically, without any knowledge about the inner workings of the process

[Tomyb]

I have to mention that, even if past videos have been in general informative or entertaining, these are the types of videos I not only like the most, but also the ones I find more useful. These types of videos are also more on point with the info, unlike say the electronic components video. That one was pretty unnecessary or just kind of useless to the average pc user, and the info was very simplified. Almost to the point that it seemed misleading or that the host didn't know what he was talking about.
The intel i3/5/7 video, hyperthreading, gpu scaling, ram drives, full disk encryption, cpu cache, drive partitions, file systems and nvme videos are all examples of very useful videos for us pc users or maybe useful information to have since there's a good chance you may one day need to use it (also as a pc user; for example full disk encryption).

I just hope that you are able to push more videos of this type. VEry good work nonetheless ;)

[PresidentMadagascar]

2:36 "cratastrophic" Oh Luke, we love you.

[kannanaiyar]

Great visuals to go with the script. Makes it easy listening

[robertabarsil]

Perhaps its a good idea to mention, that while cloning drives is a form of backing up, it should not be your only method! If you clone a drive with a virus, the virus gets cloned aswell!

[TheDyingFox]

Would have been interesting to see you use (test) a couple of these free Drive Imaging/Cloning and show pros/cons.

For example: Would it work if you clone/image a clean installed and registered Windows OS to a different Drive then put it onto another motherboard, or would you have to reactivate the key? (And other wierd stuff)...

[ildikodeak]

System cloning is the best thing that happened to me since sliced bread.

[improvementTime..]

2:13
3:10 skip extra space in imaging

[CHroNoT]

Can you do this Imaging or Cloning with two different size HDDs? Do they have to be the same type or can you use a HDD and SSD?

[AttommicDog]

I have used Acronis for years. Those disk images have saved my bacon so many times... With 1TB external drives under $60, and USB 3.0 being common, images can take less than 15 minutes. Worth it.

[gallantsteel]

So... to put it in simple terms, cloning is a faster version of imaging except that your USB can only contain one clone while if you use images, you can store multiple clones?

[egenethebest]

"special imaging software" aka plain old linux with the dd command

[gareginasatryan]

It's not sector by sector. Cloning copies the boot sectors and the partition layout and then just copies the files.
It's basically a file copy program with some additional tweaks