Cloning and restoration

Grateful to know if this is possible with True Image 9:

I need to clone the existing hard drive in my daughter's laptop to her external firewire hard drive. Then if she has to reformat her laptop hard drive for any reason, or if there is some other major software failure on it, I want her to be able to restore the cloned hdd from her external drive to the (reformatted) internal laptopn hdd. The internal hdd has two partitions of 27Gb and 10gb respectively.

Will this work? If so, presumably I need to create a bootable CD which will give her access to her firewire external hard drive so that she can copy it on to the internal laptop hdd?

Is it possible to restore the clone to the internal laptop hdd even if it (the internal hdd) has not been reformatted but is not mechanically damaged in any way?

Thanks for ssome advice on this.

David

 

For laptops, instead of making a clone, make an image of the present laptop drive on to the firewire drive. Be sure to image the entire drive - place check mark beside the drive name, not just the partitions.

Also make sure the bootable TI CD recognizes the firewire drive - there have been issues with firewire ... I don't know if it is okay now with the latest version of TI.

If you replace the laptop drive with a brand new drive, the TI boot CD has a feature called "Add New Drive" ... this will partition and format the new drive. Don't be surprised, though, that after you do this, and then proceed to Restore the image, that the TI restore process will then ask you if you want to delete the partition on the new drive, before letting you procede with the Restore.

I've always found this odd that first you must partition/format the new drive then let the software delete it in order to procede.

But the above works as long as the TI cd can see your firewire drive. I use a usb drive to hold the images for my laptop.

 

Thanks.

What is the difference between a "Backup", a "Backup Archive", A "Clone" and an "Image"?

How can I check that I can see the external firewire drive after booting from the recovery CD without going down the path of actually restoring the backups onto the internal hard drive which obviously I don't want to do as it will mess up the perfectly ok C and D drives/partitions that are already installed? You don't seem to be able to escape half way through the restoration process.

Grateful for a little further clarification.

David

 

To me, Backup and Backup Archive are one and the same.

When you make a Clone, the cloned drive can be put in place of the original and it will boot just like the original.

When you make an Image of a drive, the files are compressed to about 60 to 70 percent of the original size, thus saving space.

When you boot with the TI cd, and start the restore process, before you commit to restoring you will see a screen that says, I think, "Analyzing" and if you look carefully, first the drive letter "C" will flash by (that's your C drive) then if it sees the firewire external, you should also see another drive letter flash by. You can still continue further, without commiting to the restore, where it will ask you first what drive you want to image, then next it will ask where do you want to put your image (that would be your firewire drive).

Here you can confirm that your firewire drive is available ... and at this point you can cancel the operation.

To further help in making sure the firewire drive is seen, give the hard drive in it a volume name. You can do this when you boot the system normally in Windows. The name will also show up in the step outlined above.

 

Hello clouseau1000,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

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 agree with Chutsman and recommend you to follow Backup approach. In case of the system crash you will just need to boot your PC from Acronis True Image 9.0 Bootable Rescue CD and restore the image.

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

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov