Will Acronis TI do this?

Hi from Australia.
I hope I explain this clearly.

I have a 250GB drive with Vista on one partition and Data on the other. What I want to do is buy another 250GB drive and clone the original to it (exact bootable copy).
I want to copy to this drive once or twice a month as a backup and then if the original drive fails I can just remove that drive, connect the spare and boot up. My system would be just like I was before the HDD fail (except of course I may have a week or two of data gone, thats OK).
Can this be done? I don't really want to back just data up and if a failure happens , need to reinstall software etc. i would rather just plug a working drive in. I am guessing that this is kinda like RAID (I don't know anything about raid) but I don't have this so disk image is the way.

The reason I want something like this is i just recently had a new (3weeks old) drive fail and now I need to go through the whole lot again, installing Vista, partitions, apps, user accounts etc..what a pain!

cheers,
GoldCoaster

 

Yes, that will work, but I would use the cloned drive right away as my "new" source drive. In other words, alternate the drives right after cloning, that way you're always sure the newly cloned drive will work. You don't want to find out that the clone you have sitting there doesn't work when you need it to.

 

Why lose more than a day--maybe. TrueImage is an excellent backup program using image archives. You have a choice of cloning to get your duplicate drive; and you have a choice of imaging to backup/restore your drive when needed. Check the guides below and don't forget to do your validation and testing when doing imaging.

 

Thanks for the replies, DwnNdrty and GroverH.
I am still not sure of the answer though.

TI will give me a complete clone of my multi-partitioned 250GB drive. So I could then boot off this back-up drive as if it was the original - no setting up or restoring needed?

Alternating drives would be too much of a pain for me, I just want an exact replica of my working drive put onto a same sized spare drive (that is in an external case) Then if the worst happens , I can take the spare out of the External case and install it in my PC.

This backup drive would be enough for me, no need for anything else I think.

Can someone tell me the difference between Clone and Image just so I know I am talking about the correct thing?

 

Clone: An identical copy of the Source drive. It is immediately bootable when put in place of the original.
Image: A compressed backup of the Source drive. It has to go through the Recovery process before it will be bootable like the original.

To make it easy to remove your drives, get the rack/tray devices which lets you remove a drive simply by sliding it out of the rack. See this link:
http://www.amazon.com/Genica-Mobile-Rack-Removable-Black/dp/B000FA0W80

 

Hello goldcoaster,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that 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, I 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.

We recommend you to download and install the free trial version of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home to see how the software works on your computer. With the trial version you will be able to fully use the program from Windows for 15 days. The bootable media version will have only restore function available.

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