Can restore images be placed on drives that have other data also?

Can a restroe image be put on a hard drive, that also contains other data?
or does the image need to be placed on a drive that contains no other data or files?

[GLOW="green"]Thanks[/GLOW]
Jon
http://www.helpusall.com

 

An image created by ATI is a file and can be placed on a drive with other data.

 

thanks... i like your icon

I've read a bit more and i think that Cloning is what will work easiest.

I can Clone my RAID1 bootable drives.
That way if they get corrupt, I can just uninstall them, and install the Clone drive.
Then I can re-create the RAID1 from that single drive.

It seems pretty easy... unless I'm missing something I don't understand..

 

jonjan,

With a clone at the ready you are back in business faster than if you had to restore a large image.

However, if you use the drive that would function as the clone for the storage of images instead, you could keep on it several images that would enable you to restore to different points in time and this technique is also the more robust of the two. Moreover, imaging/restoring allows you to copy some of the images further to other media to obtain an additional level of security and you could create incremental images too, or plug an image to retrieve a file or folder.

So it's speed (for large images only) against a much greater flexibility.

 

bVolk, thank you for sharing what you've learned already.

For my needs, I just need a single copy of the most recent Hard Drive contents. I already have the Drive RAIDed to be redundant, so Cloning it is an additional layer of redundancy.
Being able to clone the windows and program settings and all those data are very helpful.

 

Hello jonjan,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please be aware that there are two approaches available:

Clone Disk - transfers 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 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.

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. The cloned hard drive can not be "updated" unless you perform the clone procedure once again.

The image archive that you get after you perform Backup is a regular file and it can be stored on any device. While during the clone procedure all the existing partitions of the destination hard drive will be deleted during cloning and all their data will be lost. Once again, the Clone Disk tool of Acronis True Image copies all the partitions of the source drive to the destination one. It is not possible to clone only system partition for example with this tool.

Since you would like to have the most recent copy of the hard drive content I would recommend that you use Backup instead of Cloning.
However, the final choice is always up to your needs.

You can find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov