Acronis TI, XP Pro, 300 GB Seagate external, works great!

Threads in forums such as this naturally tend to be about things that aren’t working, so I thought I’d write about my positive experience with Acronis TI. Last night I bought a Seagate 300 GB "Pushbutton Backup" USB/Firewire drive from Best Buy to use in conjunction with Acronis TI for backing up my XP Pro system.

Installation of the Seagate drive was just a matter of plugging in the power cord and hooking up the USB cable. I do recommend, however, reading the the Seagate Quick Start guide at the very least because there are some caveats in there that hadn't occurred to me. I didn't bother to install Seagate's backup software and I doubt I ever will.

The Seagate comes preformatted with the FAT 32 file system so I reformated it to NTFS. I then performed an Acronis TI backup of my entire boot drive to the Seagate external drive. [As an aside, and as per other threads here, it's important to backup the entire boot drive and not just the boot partition if you want to be able to restore a bootable drive.] I then swapped the working boot drive for a test drive and performed an Acronis TI restore to the test drive from the external Seagate drive using the Acronis TI boot CD. It worked perfectly and the test drive booted XP Pro just fine -- an apparent exact mirror of my original boot drive.

I must say it is very comforting having this backup mechanism in place. Kudos to Acronis for making great backup software. Keep up the good work folks.

David O.