Bootable Backup, Possible?, or Better Suggestion?

[jimlarkey]

I'm new to True Image (fornmer Ghost user), and I'm new to WinXP...migrating from old Win98SE PC.

Is it possible to clone the 125GB partition to a 80GB slave drive, and make that slave drive a bootable WinXP drive. The 125GB drive only has 10GB of data, and I don't expect it to ever get near 80GB.

What I am seeking, is if the 250GB master drive (125/125 partition) fails, I'd like to be able to rejumper the slave into a master, and run my WinXP apps. The question I have is how True Image will clone from 125GB partiton to 80GB drive.....will this cause a logical problem in True Image, even though I have data that's no where near 80GB.

If there are any better ideas, such as backup, please advise. But recall that I am looking for a bootable WinXP slave (backup) 80GB drive.

Thanks in advance for your help. Look forward to your suggestions.

Cheers,
Jim

[seekforever]

Personally, I think cloning is not the best way to do a backup of a drive; its intended purpose is to copy on old drive to a new drive and then use the new drive.

By making an image and the compression it achieves both by actual file compression where possible, the elimination of the pagefile contents, and the backing up of only "in-use" sectors, an image will be considerably smaller than the partition size. This usually allows several images to be stored concurrently whereas with a clone you only have 1 copy per physical drive.

I would partition the 80GB into 2 partitions, say 20GB and 60GB. I would use the 60GB partition to store images of my main drive. If (when) the main drive fails, I would replace it with the 80GB drive, insert the TI rescue CD and restore the desired image onto the 20GB partition and boot up the system. You just have to make sure that 20GB is big enough for your restored C partition and adjust if necessary.

If your intent is to store data on the second partition of your 125GB drive ( a good idea, IMO) you can if desired make separate images of the data onto the 60GB partition as well or you can just copy the data there as a backup.

For imaging it is best to look at your storage requirements in terms of partitions. I like a partition for the OS and installed programs, a partition for data. I also install large programs that rarely change like games on a separate partition so I don't keep backing up non-changing data.

[Acronis Support]

Hello jimlarkey,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please note that you will not be able to use "Disc Clone" tool of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home to clone the separate partition to another hard drive since "Disc Clone" tool transfers the entire contents of one disk drive to another (including all partitions).

Actually, Clone Disk approach is usually used to upgrade the hard drive (e.g. install a larger disk). However, you can use it to transfer the system to a smaller hard drive, the destanation drive should be big enough to store the data from source drive.

In your case I would agree with seekforever and recommend that you use Backup approach. It is basically dedicated for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes. It creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes.

Moreover, there are several advantages of creating an image over the disk cloning procedure such as: you can create an image without rebooting your PC, image creation can be scheduled for the particular point in time, Acronis True Image allows you to create incremental and differential images, image archive contains only the actual data and so it has a smaller size, images are ordinary files and so they can be stored on any type of the supported media, etc. However, the final choice is always up to your needs.

You can find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 in the respective User's Guide (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/docs/).

Please take a look at this FAQ article (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/faq.html/#12) explaining the difference between Clone Disk and Backup approaches in more detail.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov