Can I clone my Windows system with this?

Here is what I want to to do and why I am considering buying True Image Home 11.

I have an older hard drive that I want to use as a spare bootable incase my main drive blows on me. I want to image my current version of Windows onto it and all the settings. I don't want to move over everything as my current hard drive is 250 gigs and that one is only 40, it wouldn't fit.

Can I clone Windows onto that drive and then on my 1TB main backup drive copy everything else over? This way I will have Windows backed up in two locations and all my data on my one main backup

 

I don't know if that would work. But since you have a 1Tb drive, I would make a whole disk backup of the 250 on to it. Also make the bootable TI Rescue cd so in case your original dies, when you get a replacement drive you use the Rescue cd to restore the Backup from the 1Tb drive to the brand new drive

 

You might be surprised. I have a 250 for main drive -- C: Windows, E: Programs and F: Data. A full image of all three partitions only runs about 47 G so you OS only may very well fit on the 40.
Having said that, I agree with DwnNdrty to just image the whole disk on your big drive.
My $.02.

OTC

 

The recovery disk..

How would that work? My main drive crashes and on my backup where I have the full images of the two main drives, would I access it using the recovery disc or would I need to install Windows first in order to gain aceess to my Windows backup?

Can I restore an image on the 1tb backup drive onto the 1tb backup drive itself or can I only install onto a secondary new replacement? Would the recovery disk make it bootable with the image or do I need to install Windows fresh to make it bootable?

 

First don't do any clones, stay away from clones it is very dangerous. If you try to clone your 250gb and save it on your 1tb hard drive (everything on your 1TB will be erased).

Just backup indidvidual partitions, Do an image backup of your c: drive (if it is 250gb then it will compress down to what the use data is) example c: partition = 250gb "200gb in use" that will give you a backup file known as TIB file of about 200gb . This TIB file can be easily saved on your 1 TB without destroying or overwriting any data.

The only way you can restore that saved file onto your 1 TB drive is if your 1 TB drive is partitioned into 2 partitions and the TIB file is located in the partition that you will not be restoring. Example your 1 TB is partition into 2, e: drive 300gb / f: drive 700gb and your TIB is located in the f: drive and you will be restoring it onto the e: drive. When restored e: will become c: .

True image works best when your system partition is small 20gb in size etc. Backing up and restoring 250gb will be taking a long time even if everything works good. If you have hardware problems it can take 5 hours.

That's why I only use true image to backup my small 20gb system partition (6gb in use) it takes less than 5 minutes to do a full backup and less than 20 minutes to restore. Everything on my data partition I just use windows explorer drag and drop to backup at my convenience since the data almost never changes.

The boot cd can be use to restore if your windows drive crashes, but sometimes the drivers can be real slow, that's when you run into 5 and 10 hours to restore a drive. Even my 20gb partition can take 1.5 hours to restore using the bootcd.

 

The Rescue CD (as Acronis calls it) is a bootable cd that has the basic Backup (or Image), Recovery (or Restore) and Clone features just like the installed software. It is always advisable to make that cd, boot with it and go through a "dry run" to recover the Image from wherever you have it, in your case the 1 Tb drive. You would stop the "Dry Run" when you get to the window that has the Proceed button.

Even better is to invest in a spare hard drive and do an actual Restore to it.

 

That's why it's best to create a VistaPE or BartPE disk. If you've read any of my recent posts regarding slow recovery issues you will know it took my new PC 17 hours to recover an 80gig image from my USB2 Maxtor OneTouch back to my PC. With VistaPE that has now reduced to 37 minutes.