Backup Mapped Drive?

I have two PCs: a tower running XP Pro, and a laptop running 2k and 2k3 Server. I've purchased an external Seagate 300gb firewire/USB2 to use for backups. I am considering purchasing True Image, but first wanted to know if it will allow me to backup a mapped drive. Here's the situation:

I would install TI on the tower and use it to backup the hard drive. So far so good.

The laptop (IBM ThinkPad T42) has two hard drives. One has Windows 2000 Pro, and the second has Windows 2003 Server. When I boot it up, I can hit the blue "Access IBM" key and get to a screen where it lets me boot from either drive. In either case, the boot drive becomes drive C:, and the other becomes D:. I can turn on sharing on the D: drive, then go to the XP Pro box and map a logical drive to that D: drive. So, let's say that I map the E: drive on the tower to the D: drive on the laptop. Will Acronis let me backup that drive from the tower to the Seagate?

The reason I'm asking this is that Norton Ghost won't let me do this. It will let you backup TO a networked drive, but will not let you backup FROM a networked drive. Obviously, the idea here is to force you to buy another copy of Ghost for the other machine. This is absolutely the last straw for me with Symantec. Bit by bit, I've been weening myself from Symantec's products. You can't get any support. There are NO user forums. You have to pay through the nose to talk to someone overseas who can't put together a full sentence in English. Once I can find an alternative to Ghost (and, from what I've been hearing and reading, Acronis IS the only alternative, and a better one at that), I will never even consider a Symantec product ever again!

(Coming down off my soapbox now)
John Schneider

 

Hello johnmsch,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept my apologies for the delay with the response.

I'm afraid that Acronis True Image allows you to backup only physical, locally connected hard drives.

Please also note that according to Acronis software licensing policy, you should purchase one copy of Acronis program per every computer where it will be used.

If you have any further questions please feel free to ask.

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov