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Question about imaging HD's

D

dar124

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I've been wondering about this for a while and am just getting around to making a thread here. I use Acronis to periodically make backup images of my OS drives. I also use it to make an image after I repair / upgrade someone's PC, and occasionally to make a "before" image so that I have an easy option to revert back prior to any upgrades if need be. Someone recently asked me if I could copy some pics & data off of 2 of their older PC's and on to a new external HD for them. Not a big issue, but that got me to thinking about saving a backup copy of those pics / data for them. Would there be any benefit to making an image of the external HD after everything is copied over to it??

The only 2 things I can think of would be that it would be easier / quicker to restore to another HD if need be and (for the other person's piece of mind) I wouldnt have access to their actual files. Most of the people that I would do this for would be friends and it wouldnt be an issue for me to have their files, but I'm just trying to think ahead.

Would an image of 500GB of data be smaller than 500GB??

I'd appreciate any other input. Thanks.
 
It's certainly possible to mount a disk image and get at the underlying filesystem and files. As this sounds purely like people who trust you not to pry in the first place, and you don't want to pry, I wouldn't fuss over trying to make it harder for you to pry.

For backups of external drives full of just data (no OS or such), I'd probably just keep everything in a directory. Then you don't have to deal with any of the potential extra steps in restoring a disk image to a new drive of a different size. Maybe encrypt things on your end if you're worried about physical theft. Also makes it easier to copy subsets of their data if need be.

I can't think of too many situations where a disk image would be smaller than the data itself. If the free space on the filesystem is zero'd out, the whole disk might compress slightly better. Might.
 
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