Can I do this with Acronis TI and USB HDD?

I take care of about 10 to 12 clients that occasionally mess up their systems with bad software, viruses, spyware ect. I usually take hours to re-set their systems with all the custom software, email, network settings, even multilingual support. I charge them for it of course, $45/hr but I also work at a University and do not always have the time to fix their systems when they want. Whenever I go to fix their system I always wondered if one of those "one touch" USB external drives might be part of a solution. Some of them are offering large capacities now, enough to hold images of all my clients (I always set them up with 30 to 40 GB system partitions and leave the rest for data) So I would like to do the following.

• Go to each client and make a drive image using Acronis TI
• Put that image on my external USB drive
• Do the same for all of my clients
• Use Acronis TI and create a CD boot image
• Set this boot image up as the bootable partition on my USB drive
• Whenever a client needs a complete re-install, just bring the external drive
• Use clients computer to boot to external drive, choose the appropriate image, and restore.

My question is could I do this? And, if I could, would I need to purchase a seperate license of Acronis TI for each client?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, simusphere and myluvnttl have already contributed some valuable advice and one of the reasons I lean to using ATI is because of the strong and active forum support.

 

John,

After you resolve the license issue I think you only need a single Acronis bootable CD for all the computers. Boot to this CD and choose the appropriate image on your external HD.

So your tools are, one CD and one external HD. Are you trying to cut out the CD?

 

I thnk you are safer using a boot CD than assuming that each of your client's PC's will allow you to boot from an external drive... Older BIOS's may not like that.

 

Yes, to be legal, each PC for each client would need a license.

However, you can buy TrueImage at newegg.com for $30, so each client is really going to save money the first time a system needs to be restored.

By the way, you plan will work great! If each client will also buy a USB drive, they can make their own backups.

 

My clients consider themselves to be "above" having to know anything about computers so I need to have a solution that does not require them to do anything.

jmk94903, thanks for reminding me of the egg, it is worth it!

Sonu S, You are right about older BIOS's, I would like to try installing a recovery CD image on the external drive just to see if I could do it though!

 

Hello John,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

As for making the external USB hard drive bootable, I'm afraid that Acronis True Image 8.0 does not allow you to anyhow integrate the capabilities of the Bootable Rescue CD into the external USB hard drive.

Please be aware that even if you will be able to do this in some way then it will not be officially supported method and we would not be able to provide you with the technical support if you will encounter any problems using your bootable rescue hard drive. I appreciate your consideration on this matter.

I would agree with Brian K and suggest you to use external USB hard drive in conjunction with Bootable Rescue CD.

What concerns the licensing policy. Please note that we provide special licensing\pricing in such cases like yours. I advice you to contact our Sales Team at sales@acronis.com in order to discuss all the details with the respective sales person.

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

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov