Maximum PC

Hello, I have a couple of questions concerning backup possibilities.

1.
Last year FascistNation recommended Macrium Reflect to me for cloning Hard Disk Drives and I just wanted to confirm that it is faster than using DD in Linux? I tried PMing FascistNation but my message is still in my Outbox. Any other recommendations?

I have some more backing up to do and would like to use the fastest solution.
Here is what was our previous conversation:
Subject: Samsung F3 HD103SJ Hard Drive HD Slow Speed+Failure

2.
Does anyone know if there is any disk cloning software that can copy by sector but restore by files to a different drive instead of overwriting what is already there?

Background info is I have a entire 1 TB hard disk drive just for data that I have split into 3 seperate drives to ease with backups. Each partition is nearly full and has several thousand small files as well as large files.

I want to copy all of the files from a partition by sector instead of by file so as to minimize the read/write heads moving back and forth but when I restore it I want to restore just the files instead of restoring a duplicate of the source partition. Either this or I will need to restore them by partition and then somehow combine partitions

Not sure this would really be better than a modern backup program that does it by file BUT copying sectors in a serial fashion seems like it would be easier on the drive at least in theory.

A lot of people point to this solution, it may be what you are looking for:

http://www.acronis.com/

Nasty

Wow, I have an inbox?!

As far as I know MR is still the fastest. While bloody important the most important aspect of a backup is an accurate/stable backup. You can always backup on the fly in the background using low CPU cycles or schedule to backup in the wee hours and then shutdown.

Also the paid version allows incremental imaging.

It should definitely be faster than DD which images a faithful sector by sector image. MR (and Acronis) don't bother backing up a sector if there is no data in it.

DD is of more use on a bad drive to recover data (dd_rescue works better).