Techie Tuesday: Macrium Rapid Delta Clone (RDC)

As with Rapid Delta Restore (RDR), which we looked at last week, the concept of RDR has been something that has been thought about for quite some time here at Macrium Software. We wanted to build a clone solution that would effectively and rapidly copy only the differences between the source and target file systems. The advantage of this is obvious, RDC offers similar a performance increase as an Incremental disk image offers over a Full image and enables regular clones to be a viable and fast DR solution.

How does it work?

The NTFS file system resident on the clone source is compared with file system on the target disk. The two file systems are first verified that they originated from the same format command and then the target NTFS file system structures are analyzed for differences. All the NTFS file system structures are copied to the target disk and any that do not exist or have been modified on the target disk cause the data records for each NTFS file or object to be copied as well. The result is an ‘Incremental’ clone applying only file system changes detected between the source and the target.

Note: RDC works with NTFS file systems only. All other file systems will perform a full clone

Note: RDC is not available when shrinking partitions during a clone.

See also New in Version 6 and New in Version 6.1

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