Beginner's Question

[bosela]

I cloned an image of the disk drive in my notebook to a hard drive connected to a USB II connection. The process was completed under Windows Vista Home Basic. True Image Home rebooted the system and performed the clone operation in a “secure” mode. The C: drive was backed up to the F: drive.

My question is very basic: Can I use True Image Home to restore the cloned version of the system from the F: drive back to the C: drive? Since performing the clone operation I have tried to install a program that would not install under Vista and since that time I can not restore windows to an earlier checkpoint. If I can transfer the disk image back to C: it would resolve my problem.

[DwnNdrty]

First make the bootable True Image Rescue CD from the installed software.
Then boot with it and perform the Clone operation from your external back to the drive inside the notebook.
NOTE: in Acronis speak, if you initially cloned the notebook to the external, what you have on the external is a Clone, not an Image. The term Image is reserved for when you use the Backup feature.

[sparkymachine]

-{ Quote: "My question is very basic: Can I use True Image Home to restore the cloned version of the system from the F: drive back to the C: drive?" }-

Dwn is right of course. The purpose of cloning is not really for restore purposes but to take your system from one drive to another to use as a boot drive.

[jonyjoe81]

This link will show you what you can expect when restoring vista. But as long as you have a good image/clone backup, you can eventually get the restored drive to bootup with some repairs.


http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184852

[bosela]

Thanks for the help. I will make creating a Recovery CD my first priority.

[Acronis Support]

Hello bosela,

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

Please be aware that, as have been pointed by DwnNdrty and sparkymachine, there are two approaches available:

Clone Disk - migrates/copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another;

Backup - creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes;

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

Actually, Clone Disk approach is usually used to upgrade the hard drive (e.g. install a larger disk), while Backup approach is basically dedicated for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes. Since you are interested in backing up your hard drive for the disaster recovery purposes, we would recommend you to follow Backup approach.

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 in the respective User's Guide (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/docs/).

As of the current situation, you can clone from your USB drive back to your system drive.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov