If you want to bring your entire partition back, an image backup would be fastest, although the 'standard' restore process would replace anything currently on the target partition. But if you don't need that ability, you'll likely be happier with image backups.įor restore scenarios, with the exception of the NTFS permission difference I just mentioned, you can achieve the same results regardless of which type of backup you perform, but the exact steps will be a little bit different. With image backups, that would require mounting the image backup and using command-line utilities to copy data back in a certain way, and I didn't want to have to explain how to do that in the 'In case I get hit by a bus' emergency procedural documentation that I wrote for this client.

The only reason I perform F&F backups of an entire Data partition on a server that I support is because I want the ability to restore individual files while retaining custom NTFS permissions since this is a file server in a company, so there are several folders with special permissions configured.

Because image backups operate at the disk block level, compared to F&F backups that operate at the file level, backups run more quickly, and Incremental/Differential images will usually be smaller because with image backups, only those changed blocks on the disk need to be backed up, whereas with F&F backups, if a tiny change is made to a huge file, a new copy of that entire file has to be captured.

If you want to back up everything on the partition, you'll almost always want an image backup.

Reflect backup