Acronis10 laptop to usb external

Hiya there,

Im all new to this Acronis, but my question is this;

I have a HP laptop with pre-installed vista business 32bit on NTFS. It is on a 160GB Sata drive.

I also have an external USB IDE HDD 160GB also that i want to clone a direct copy from my C: drive to my USB External.

Doing this and supposed some day the laptop hdd dies with no OS installed on it but my external has, is it still possible to boot from the external USB that will have the exact copy on it to re-clone back into C: drive or will i need to create some sort of boot disc to support this.



Thanks

 

Windows cannot normally be booted from an external USB drive. What you want to do is to create an Acronis True Image Rescue Disk. You should also create an image of your system and store it on your external drive. Should your hdd die you boot from this Rescue Disk and restore the image of your system to a new hdd which drive should preferably have the same characteristics as the old drive.

Follow the Beginner's Guide given here:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=168165

 

Hello acronis10,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please notice that dld is correct: Windows cannot boot from usb drives.

Please also 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.

As pointed by dld, to restore a computer without operating system you will need to use Acronis Bootable Rescue Media.

You can find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide, and also in the thread dld pointed to.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov