Copy C: partition to second HD?

I ams using Acronis True Image for back-up purposes and find it very intuitive and good to work with. Luckily I have not yet had to restore.

I run a RAID0 pair, and back up to a 3rd stand-alone SATA HD, as well as a USB external drive. As far as the internal HD goes, I would like to create a copy of my C: drive on it, as well as the backups I am incrementing, so that if one of my RAID0 pair goes out I can very easily get back up and running by making the stand-alone HD the bootable one in BIOS.

I looked at the cloning operation in Acronis TI, but find in reading the manual that this appears to be focused on transferring the boot sector to the new HD and maybe even disabling it on the source drive. I wish to keep booting from my (source) RAID0 pair until I can no longer do so. From what I see in the manual, the cloning operation may not be appropriate if it disables the source RAID0 pair from booting after the cloning is complete.

My strategy was (if my RAID0 pair died)- to boot from my copy of the C: drive (after changing the HD boot priority in BIOS), where I would already have Acronis True Image installed, and then run a restore to update the various partitions to their incremented (current) state.

Is there a better way to accomplish this task?

Thanks- Bruce.

 

Hello brucek,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that when performing the clone operation you will be presented with an option to choose what to do with the data on the source drive (set to keep the data intact by default). So it is safe to perform a cloning operation and then continue to use the original drive. Please notice, however, that it is generally not recommended to boot while having several system drives plugged in. Please see this article for more detailed explanation.
Please also notice that incremental backups can only be restored together with all the previous incremental ones and the full one they relate to.

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

You are correct in that 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

 

Thankyou Marat,

"Since you are interested in backing up your hard drive for the disaster recovery purposes, we would recommend you to follow Backup approach. "

I will follow your advice. Thanks again.

Bruce.