cloning to external drive

New user here. I cloned my laptop 'c' drive to a external USB drive. Is there a way that I can verify that everything got copied? Also is there a way to boot from the external drive? I am a 15 yr Mac user who is trying to learn the pc world. I am using XP and purchased TI 10. I looked thruout the forum but coulod not find any answers. Any advice would be way cool. thanks----mtbike

 

The only way to test it's success is to do a restore from it-hope you validated it too.

 

Windows won't boot from an external drive. If you cloned the drive and it's a laptop drive, you could install it in the laptop and see if it boots.

Normally, I perfer doing a backup image to the external. It takes less space and I can have several instead of just one.

 

Validating external drive(cloned)

New user. How can I select the external drive which I have cloned my laptop too? I want to validate it. When I go to the validate tool I cannot select the whole external drive. Do I have to validate 1 at a time?--------mtbikebj

 

Re: Validating external drive(cloned)

Need to check the terminology? Did you make an actual clone (identical duplicate) of your drive or did you make an image of it and store the image tib file(s) on the external?

You can only validate image files not a clone of the source drive.

 

I think you should reformat the external drive and then make an image of your entire notebook hard drive to the USB drive as MudCrab suggested.

Cloning is used when you are replacing a drive. For example, you buy a new larger drive, so you clone your old drive to it to avoid having to reinstall Windows and all your software, etc. After cloning, you remove the old drive and boot from the new drive.

Images are used to backup a drive in case of failure, corruption, virus attacks, bad installations of new hardware or software, etc. An external drive can typically hold many images of your hard drive, so you can fully protect yourself.

Macs are good machines, but Windows machines are more commone, so welcome to the rest of the world. You'll find a lot of help here in keeping your system protected.

 

thanks to all for the advice.--mtbikebj

 

Re: Validating external drive(cloned)

thanks for the advice. I cloned my laptop to my external. I wanted a total backup of everything on my laptop drive. I was instructed my a tech person to do this. Makes more sense to just do images. I went with what he said.-mtbikebj

 

Re: Validating external drive(cloned)

That's is exactly what an image does, it takes a "snapshot" of your whole drive and copys an image so you are able at a future time maybe with a hard dive failure, or even getting infected with a bad virus. you can "recover" the image back to the day you made it. Ie: the Operating system and all your data and programs as they were when the image/backup was made.

A clone is usually used when you are going to upgrade to a new larger drive.
You install the drive and clone to it then unplug the old drive and plug in the new "cloned" drive.
I used an image to do this myself, I simply swapped the new drive with the old drive and restored my image using the "rescue CD" ( you did make a rescue CD didn't you?) It is possible to have several images on one external USB HDD, or internal backup HDD. I keep an image of the day I first installed my operating system, and another one of the day I installed all the "necessary" programs ( such as anti-virus programs etc.)
I have an internal Backup drive with several images and an external USB HDD with several images. Plus I burned a single DVD image with A barebones XP image on it. It all fit on one DVD.

 

Hello mtbikebj,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that previous posters are correct, and there are two approaches available:

Clone Disk - migrates/copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another;

Backup - creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes;

Please take a look at this FAQ article explaining the difference between Clone Disk and Backup approaches in more detail.

Actually, Clone Disk approach is usually used to upgrade the hard drive (e.g. install a larger disk), while Backup approach is basically dedicated for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes. Since you are interested in backing up your hard drive for the disaster recovery purposes, we would recommend you to follow Backup approach.

Moreover, there are several advantages of creating an image over the disk cloning procedure such as: you can create an image without rebooting your PC, image creation can be scheduled for the particular point in time, Acronis True Image allows you to create incremental and differential images, image archive contains only the actual data and so it has a smaller size, images are ordinary files and so they can be stored on any type of the supported media, etc. However, the final choice is always up to your needs.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov