Acronis True Image 11 Help

I have an HP Pavilion computer with Windows XP Home. The hard drive is only 20gb and some of that is taken up by restore partition. I have access to Acronis True Image Home 11.

I do NOT want to repartition the hard drive to allow me to use the hard drive to to allow Acronis to put the image on the hard drive.

One option is to get an external hard drive. Will Acronis backup to an external hard drive?

The option I would really like to use is imaging the C-drive to a DVD and I have several questions about what the results will be:

1. Will Acronis image to DVD and would that image be bootable if Windows in NOT working?

2. I have heard that Acronis has problems restoring from an image on a DVD(s). Is this true and if so is there a fix for it??

3. Can an image on a DVD be used to restore an image to a new hard drive?

4. I also have access to Ghost 2003, but I know Ghost has an issue spanning disks when making an image. Does Acronis have this same issue??

This should give me some help in deciding what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

Imaging onto the same drive is not a good backup strategy anyway, so no problem with that decision.

Yes, that's the most logical imaging medium, since if you want you can store it off-site for an additional level of security from fire damage, etc.

The main Acronis TI disk (if you bought the retail disk, or if you make one if you downloaded TI) is bootable if Windows is not working. The DVDs containing the image would then be used after booting with the main Acronis TI disk.

I use an external HD, so I can't answer that. Considering the low cost of external drives these days I can't imagine why anyone would want to use DVDs. They're slow, expensive, and throw away.

In theory once you get the Acronis TI boot disk loaded you can select any file from any source to restore the image. The boot program loads into RAM so I think you can remove the boot disk once the program is loaded and running. Then you could insert the DVD and select the image file from there.

In theory no, but in practice it might have some functional issues, I don't know.

There's another forum specific to TI, where you would probably get more responses if you haven't already posted there too.