Confused Newbie

Acronis True Image Home 11- Questions:

1- Will cloning a drive also clone hidden recovery/restore partitions?

2- Can I save more than 1 clone (with different names/dates) on the same external hard drive?

3 - Can I save backups on the same external drive that I have saved a clone?

4 - What is the proper way to delete: a: Old clones / b: Old backups?

Thank you for your help.

 

Yes. A clone is an exact copy of the original drive as far as content and partitions. It is possible to alter the size of partitions when cloning, but the content will be identical. You can't clone part of a drive. It's all or nothing/

No. The entire drive is cloned to an entire drive. If you clone again, the first clone is gone and you have only the second clone. That's why cloning is not used for backups but only to install an new (ususally larger) hard drive in place of the current drive.

Well, that's sort of clever. You could store backups on a cloned drive. I can't think of any good reason to do this however. It makes more sense to just store backup image on the drive since each one can recreate the original drive.

Old clones can be deleted by deleting the partitions on the drive; or if there is only one partition, by reformatting the drive.

Old backup image can be deleted in Windows Explorer. They are simply large data files and can be deleted as easily as a Word document.

If you are not installing a new hard drive, just use image backups and store them on an external USB 2.0 or Firewire hard drive.

If you want to make your life simple, make only full system backups of your entire hard drive. These are bigger, but they always restore successfully.

 

Hello DBH,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that, as pointed by jmk94903 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 more information on how to use Acronis True Image in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Thank you, John. Your explanation was clear & concise. I am enlightened.

 

We try to help here. It's unusual that we are able to provide enlightenment.

 

Color me a confused novice also. So its better to use backup disk than clone. I have 2 hds & 1 usb external hd. The external has lot of room. So i said back up disk 2 & tried to put the backup on the external hd in the unused partition. Beats me how you do that. What am i doing wrong? TIA

 

When you reached the dialog window where you are asked to select a destination for the Backup, were you unable to choose the external hard drive?

 

Yes was unable to see the external drive. I think i must format it to be seen by xp. If so how do you do that? TIA

 

Are you saying that when you plug in your USB drive and power it on, windows doesn't detect it?

 

jtmedin,
A review of my guides listed below could be helpful.

 

Okay I went to Microsoft help and found out how to make a USB drive available to XP. Thanks!