- Backing up a hard drive is the same principle as backing up a CD or DVD. Storage disks, whether magnetic or optical, are circular, with structured sectors containing data similar to slices of pie. Cloning involves making replicas of each sector, although compression may be used as an efficiency measure instead of copying unused file space from the original disk. In the case of data recovery a complete copy of all sectors is required. Whether cloning is for a second disk, second hard drive or several computers, it can be achieved with imaging software. An imaging server, also known as multicast, can clone several hard drives at one time.
- A popular program for cloning hard drives is Norton's Ghost. You will need specific cables to connect both computers. Boot Ghost and select to copy from the old drive to the new drive. If you are upgrading the hard drive just run install, and run Sysprep on the old drive. Sysprep can be downloaded from Microsoft. The software, as you would expect, will walk you through the steps in a quick, straightforward manner.
- On a PC, if you restore back to the factory settings from the restore CD, you're literally doing the same thing as cloning. The restore CD is nothing more than an image of the original hard drive. You can also set the date back on a Windows operating system prior to corruption or other problems. The "System Restore" function has been included in Microsoft operating systems since Windows ME. From 2003 on, a Windows feature called "shadow copy" has offered an automatic and manual backup utility to make "snapshots" of files and folders for specific storage areas and times on systems, known as volumes. The Leopard Operating System on a Mac offers an automated backup feature called "Time Machine."
