step by step please

Hi, excuse me for being a bit slow PC wise, I'm still learning. I have XP Home. 250 gig HD, and 80 gig external HD for back-up. I also have Acronis True Image 9 and Acronis Disc Director Suite.

My problem is backing up to the erxternal HD. I cloned my PC Hard Drive to the external HD, and then later did two Incremental Back -ups. I am now told the external HD is full.(I should mention I have two Partitions). What I am trying to do is copy my Pc to the external HD and keep it up dated so I could set myself up elsewhere, if it became neccessary.

I feel I have made a fool of myself and have to start from scratch. Please could someone give a step by step on 1) How to format the External HD removing the partitions (I have two partitions on the PC as well.) and 2) give me a step by step on how to do the Back-up properly. Many thanks. jopras.

 

For backup with ATI do a search on this forum for "Grover" and then read the material in the links at the bottom of any of his posts.

For formating, the steps differ depending on which drive and whther use the command line disk editor or the windows interface. Best bet is to open Windows Help and search on "partitions" then highlight and display "Delete a partition or logical drive".

 

You might be a little confused between cloning and imaging.

In cloning, you have copied your PC hard drive exactly as it is and transferred it to the external, therefore it takes up exactly the same space as your current drive. As the external drive is 80GB and your PC drive is 250GB the clone probably only just fitted on and adding two extra largish files filled it up completely. Not sure how 250 has fitted on an 80GB unless TI has only cloned the actual sectors in use.

Imaging on the other hand takes all the information on your PC, compresses it into a special type of file and stores that on the external drive. An 250GB drive contents might compress to a 15GB file, so would easily sit on your external drive.

As shieber says Grovers guides are extremely helpful.

Colin

 

1. First step would be to take the precautionary steps of assigning meaningful names to ALL your drives. You need to be able to identify your drives by their names--not their drive letters. Be sure to assign names to both partitions of your external drives. When deleting the external drive partitions you want to make absolutely certain that you are deleting the correct partitions.

2. As Shieber indicated, it's difficult to give you exact step by step instructions partition delete instructions. The best we can do is to give you an overview. Either Windows XP Disk management or Disk Director will suffice

In deleting the partitions, one method would be to open XP Disk Management and have the external USB drive pictured on your screen. Click on the external drive to make sure you have the correct drive selection. You should be able to Right click the 2nd partition of the external USB drive and choose delete. Then, Right click on the first partition of the USB drive and choose delete. Once you have un-formatted space, you should be able to Right click the entire space and choose the Format option. You probably want to use the same file system (FAT32 or NTFS) as your system drive--which is also pictured on your screen.

If you choose NTFS, your backup file will be one large file. If you choose FAT32, your backup file will be a series of 4GB files. If you plan on copying backup file to DVD (as supplemental additional copies), you will have to use the TI "Archive splitting" option to have TI create DVD sized files during creation of the backup.

As Bodgy mentioned, imaging works best for creating backups of your system. My thanks to both Shieber & Bodgy for mentioning my guides. These illustrate how to create a full backup of your entire system and how to restore your entire disk. These guides do not cover all backup or restore possibilities that exist but if you create such a backup (image archive), you are a lot closer to being able to restore your system should your hard drive fail.

Links below to my guides. Once you get to the links page, there are several other tutorials and user guides available.

 

Just like to thank you guys who have helped me out on Step By Step.many thanks. jopras.