Back Up My C: Drive

I would like to know the cleanest way to back up my Windows C drive. This has all my progs in it. My idea is to image that drive to an external drive I have.

In order to get a clean image, how do I do that. I presume I would need the recovery cd to boot up if ever I had problems with Windows.

Can I image my partitioned laptop in the same way? I would then be imaging my c and e drive to an external drive?

 

I'm not sure what you mean by a clean image but backing up to an external drive is certainly a good approach. TI takes a snapshot of you current installation and creates a file that you can use to restore in the event of an emergency. You will need a boot CD to recover if your hard drive becomes un bootable. You need a new boot CD each time you install a newer version of TI.
I suggest you download and res the user guide: http://download.acronis.com/pdf/TrueImage9.0_ug.en.pdf and also review this article http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/company/inpress/2006/06-15-1ati.html.

 

Thank you for the reply.

By clean image i mean backing up all the files . If I have open files, I presume these will not get backed up.

My intention is, to image my c and e drive to external and if my laptop ever craps out I should be able to restore back to my last image and I will then be back up and running without needing to get software updates etc.

I will ty a few things this week-end. I just want to be sure that going the external route will give me the ability to restore. It sound like using the recovery cd in event of problems will solve any possible Windows problems

 

Candle_66 said:If I have open files, I presume these will not get backed up.
Acronis backs up all in use sectors, I believe this includes open files. The experts will have to address this one.
There is lots of discussion about using external drives, some work OK with the Rescue CD,which is Linux based some don't. The other option is to use BartPe http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ and the Bartpe plugin built into TI 9.0 B3677. Search the forum for discussions of the various issues using an external hard drive. I back up my laptop to a drive on my desktop machine over the network. I also suggest you look at this discussion of TI http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/company/inpress/2006/06-15-1ati.html.

 

Should you have need to replace your system hard drive,
just be sure your backups were made using the backup the disk as the selected option. Likewise, in the restore to a new disk, choose the disk as the restore option.