A clone is essentially a bit for bit copy of your drive, 100% identical hence the name clone very similar to you taking a cutting of a plant which genetically is going to be identical to the mother.

A backup can be automated (so can imaging software's as well), but generally is manually copied over whatever specifics the user desires to be backed up. A backup is a copy or more of the same thing.

These both have similarities, but think of a clone as you taking a snapshot of you getting yourself all made up and then you go and get pictures taken of yourself all made up. Now in this fantasy metaphor example, if desired, you can restore yourself to look exactly like the pictures taken back when you were all made up to be literally identical to the snapshots where you put forth whatever efforts to look whichever way you selectively chose to look.

So having such an image/clone just in case something happens to your system, you could take this image and do what is called restore the image. This means that bit for bit, it's going to be identical to the snapshot as whenever it was taken.

A backup, is copies of whatever you selectively chose to backup. So if something was for whatever reasons no longer made to work (audio file, movie, video you have created etc.), you could just copy over the additional copy that you backed up and overwrite it which would make that piece of data work once again.

-----Original Message-----
From: main@TechTalk.groups.io <main@TechTalk.groups.io> On Behalf Of Nancy Hill
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 20:01
To: TechTalk <main@TechTalk.groups.io>
Subject: [TechTalk] BackUp vs Clone

Everyone,

My laptop is running win10 and one of the latest jaws.


What is the difference between backing up a laptop's hard drive and cloning it?


Thanks,

Nancy