cloning a hard disk

I fully understand the diffference between cloning and creating an image. Our small trading firm has decided that cloning each of our existing hard drives to external usb drives would best suit our needs. We would also like to take advantage of using a separate partition on the usb drives to create images of each hard drive and then use the incremental or differential backups as further precautions. I have a couple of questions. First, the drives we are backing up are fairly large but do not contain that much data. How much unallocated space will be left on the usb drive after cloning. Ideally we would like a lot of space remaining to then partition the drive for further image backup as I previously mentioned. Or should I not even bother partitioning the hard drive and simply create folders with the backup images I am going to create? Would that create problems if I want to boot from the usb drive(which my BIOS supports)? Thanks for any help.

 

Hello gtbessie,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that when you clone a small hard drive to a large hard disk, you are able to change the disk partition layout without any problems. You can specify a partition size by yourself.

Yes, you can create an image of your hard drive to the external USB hard disk and restore it simply, if a system doesn't boot properly.

Using Acronis True Image 9.0 you will be able to create a special bootable rescue media(CD or a pack of floppies). If your system fails you will just need to boot from the rescue media and restore the system.

When booted from the bootable media you are able to access any connected hard disks as well as a wide variety of IDE, SCSI, FireWire (IEEE-1394), USB (1.0, 1.1, 2.0) and PC card (PCMCIA) interfaces and devices, including CD-ROM, CD-R(RW), DVD, network, Iomega Zip and Jaz. So you can store your image files there.

You can find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 in the respective User's Guide.

Please download Acronis True Image 9.0 trial version at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/ in order to check how the product works.

Please visit Acronis online store to purchase the full version of the product.

Please also note that we have a flexible system of discounts and the amount of the discount varies depending on the number of copies you want to purchase.

In case you are planning to purchase many copies, please contact our Sales Team at sales@acronis.com.

Thank you.
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Tatyana Tsyngaeva