Newbie Needs advice on ATI10 Home

I just bought ATI 10 Home and I am planning on upgrading my main hard drive to a bigger drive. I currently have a 74GB Raptor and want to upgrade to a 150GB Raptor, so I will want to transfer all of my files to the new drive when it gets here.

I used Disk Clone for my main HD, which holds my OS, and backed it up to a eSATA 250GB HD. Does that mean that my Registry is also backed up too?

For my second HD, I just used the Files backup to create a backup.

Is this the best way to go when using ATI10? Should I use the Disk Clone on all of my C drive backups and wipe clean the old ones?

I'm sort of confused with this software. Any help would be appreciated.

 

I think the first thing that needs to be cleared up is what kind of computer do you have? Is it a laptop with a single drive, or is it a desktop with room from a Master drive and a Slave drive?

 

It's a self built desktop computer with 3 SATA hard drives. One has my OS and apps, one has my documents and other media and one is for backups which is connected through eSATA.

 

Your setup:

74GB Master to be upgraded to 150GB Master
XXGB Slave
250GB eSATA (external drive with clone of the 74GB Master)

The more common way of upgrading your main drive would be to install the new 150GB drive as Slave and clone your 74GB drive to the 150GB drive, choosing to automatically expand the existing partition to fill the new drive. This you would do using your Acronis Rescue Disk which runs in a Linux environment. Once the cloning is complete your computer will want to reboot. Let is power down, but pull the plug on it before it reboots. Remove the 74GB and replace it with the 150GB, replug and boot. You don't want to end up with the problems described here.

A clone is an exact replica of all that is on a drive, including registry settings.

I would format the 250GB eSATA and use it for storing images of your system. Personally I keep three images which I rotate, three because that's all the room I have. Furthermore I'd move My Documents, OE files and My Favorites to the XXGB Slave drive. That way you don't have to overwrite these files when restoring an image. I picked up this hint from here.

Although some use cloning as a backup stategy, IMHO it is not the way to go. Let's say you clone a 150GB drive to a 250GB drive. You have created an exact replica of the 150GB drive which might have only 30GB used space. Your tying up a 250GB drive to backup 30GB data. Much better to create an image of your 150GB drive. With proper compression the image might occupy 25GB on the 250GB drive. You can put 10 such images on the 250GB drive. Why so many images? You never know if an image might contain malware or some instability in your OS. Ten spares is better than one spare, whether you dealing with tires or images!

 

Great. Thanks so much for the help and the hints. I'll let you know how the migration works........Thanks again.

 

Gotta love the internet for information

I've been researching ATI10 and backing up in general the past week and decided on ATI10 and an eSATA 400G drive strictly for backup storage.

I was going to ask some general questions but Boyo beat me to them. Actually Boyo's setup sounds similar to mine.

I received my disk version of ATI10 from NewEgg yesterday and just got my Cavalry 400G drive today (formatting to NTFS, at work, as we speak). Tonites project = backing up with a few glasses of wine tossed in.

My question is should I make a BartPE disc or take a chance using the ATI10 recovery disc?

 

Use the ATI10 Rescue disc. The BartPE disc would only be needed if the Linux drivers included in the ATI10 Rescue disc were not able to handle your particular hardware configuration.

 

Hello everyone,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

I would like to add one small thing to a great explanation dld provided. As you may know, plugging out the PC during the boot sequence is not good for hardware. Therefore, I would suggest you to boot to Acronis Bootable Rescue Media interface again, and choose the option “Turn off computer” in the lower left corner of selection (Safe/Full/Windows) screen.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov