Better to clone drives partition by partition or byte by byte?

[OgreVorbis]

On my main PC I have an SSD that I like to backup every month or so. I have been backing it up to an old fashioned HDD. I have decent knowledge of drives and how they work, but I've always been a little worried about one thing. I've been backing up partition by partition from my SSD to HDD by booting into Easus Disk Copy (old version). It's more annoying to do partition by partition, but I do it like this cause I'm afraid if I do "byte by byte" that I will copy the MBR or some other weird code stuff onto the HDD and cause problems. Cause doesn't the MBR or other data segments contain info about drive geometry and type, and so if I just clone that to the other drive...???

 

See, I've always cloned between identical drives in the past, so I don't have the experience of making a 1 to 1 drive copy onto a completely different model and drive type.

 

So if I do a byte by byte copy, do I then need to remake the MBR or something (I don't care if it's not bootable, just want it to be accessible)?

Should I just keep doing partition by partition instead?

Could I ever render a drive useless by doing a byte by byte to a different drive?

[johnno23]

you can simply clone a drive at block level and should not experience an issue other than going to bios on first boot and selecting the drive you want to boot from.

However the clone is a clone not a back up which means you will need to repeatedly clone if you want to go that route.

If you want to ensure you dont lose things make a true back up one time only and then allow the backup software to make the incremental changes as needed.

I use the system restore point in windows once a week and have it set to remove the older restore points. I also use the function anytime MS release a major update or if I install any apps I want to explore etc.