brett <account@cygen.com> wrote:

>> Yeah, the only real downside over a clone is that it takes a
>> little longer to have a usable system after a drive failure, but
>> thats hardly ever that important with a personal system.

> What do you mean by this last part?

Just that if you have a true clone of the original drive, and that fails,
all you have to do is physically unplug the original drive and plug in
the replacement. That only takes seconds with a laptop.

With an image, you have to replace the physical drive and then restore the
image to the new drive, and that takes quite a bit longer, just the restore step.

> Doesn't TrueImage make the restore bootable

Yes it does make the restored drive bootable.

> or is there something else you manually have to do?

Only physically replace the original now dead drive with its
replacement before you do the actual restore to the new drive.

> If the primary crashes and you can't boot into it, TrueImage allows
> you to make a bootable CD but where do you go from there?

Replace the drive that has died with the replacement.

Boot the TI restore CD, tell it to restore the image to the new drive.

Boot the new drive in the usual way.

> Format the primary and restore the image onto it?

Just do the restore, no need to format it.

> Will it be bootable

Yes.

> or can you mark it to be bootable?

No need.

> I guess TrueImage will handle my needs.

Yes it will. The only thing it cant do is incremental cloning.

You can clone the entire original drive as often as you like.

> I'll just not expect to be up and running immediately.
> Maybe a couple of hours, which is fine.

Yes, it will do that fine.