Newbie Wants Copy of Hard Drive

Forgive my ignorance: I recently purchased a 250 gig external drive after my wife's laptop crashed. My idea was to create two subdirectories on the drive, one each for our 90 gig hard drives. I want to create a copy of the drive. I know there are mirrors and clones, but when I tried the mirror option, my hard drive was being written to a single file. What I want is to create a copy of the hard drive on the external drive, such that if I use a file manager I can go over to the external drive and see a physical copy of all the directories and files in my original drive. Is this crazy? Or does Acronis not do this?

For example, if I copied the drive over to the external drive, I could play around with my iTunes and, if I mess it up, I can simply do an incremental backup from my original drive to overwrite whatever I did. Or, if the hard drive crashes I can copy the hard drive back from the external drive onto a reformatted drive.

It is not clear to me if I were to be able to do this whether the drive would function as an "executable" or functioning computer within its subdirectory.

I looked around at the help files and could not get a description that I could understand as to how cloning differs from mirroring.

Thanks in advance.

Steve

 

Hello Steve,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept my apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note, that there are two approaches available:

Disk Cloning approach - moves the entire contents of one disk drive to another.

Create Image approach - creates a special archive file for backup and disaster recovery purposes.

Please read more in the following FAQ article.

Disk Clone approach is usually used to upgrade the hard drive, while Create Image approach is basically dedicated for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes.

Please also note that we recommend you to unplug one of the hard drives right after the disk cloning process has been finished, since keeping both original and cloned hard drives connected might cause different boot or drive letter assignment problems.

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

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov