Will my coloned partition replace my crashed hard drive

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by Confused Coloner, Sep 16, 2005.

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  1. Confused Coloner

    Confused Coloner Registered Member

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    I bought an internal hard drive and put it into an external hard drive enclosuer connected to a USB 2 port to my computer. My motive was to colone my hard drive in case of a crash. When I tried to colone a disk,,,,,it always came back as....disk not found. Well I gave up on that and then found out that I could colone a partition. I then coloned the whole partition of my in use hard drive C to my external drive. When I do an incremental backup, it takes just as long as coloning the whole partition and leaves little icons on my external hard drive which I assume is the incremental back up. I guess it is separate from the partition back up.

    So now if my hard drive was to crash, would I have to buy a new hard drive, and install it into my computer, and then colone back to the newly installed drive from my compressed back up file on my external drive . If I am correct would my entire coloned partition including my OS now be backed up on Drive C uncompressed just like before the crash and I could carry on business like usual. Now that is what I assume what Acronis will do, but now am not sure. Would one also have to back up the little incremental files separately along with the main coloned partition back up file.

    I would appreciate anyone who could give me the information that I seek.

    Thanks Kindly
     
  2. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    What you want to do is make an image of your hard drive to the external USB2 drive. You do not want to clone the drive. You should make the full system backup of the entire internal hard drive, not just the boot partition, in order to guarantee that the restored image will be bootable.

    Since the image is only of the used part of the drive and is compressed, you can probably store several images on the external drive.

    In the event of a drive failure of any kind, you can restore the image to the same or a replacement internal drive and be up and running again in a short time with little work.
     
  3. Confused Coloner

    Confused Coloner Registered Member

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    Thanks John for your advise.

    I now assume that coloning the whole partition of my Drive C would then automatically include everything including the Operating System to my backup Drive. My computer internal hardrive is just partition C and not like most , consisting of usually C and a D partition.

    I also did an experiment and tried to restore on to my external hard drive and as it started to copy files, it always stops with that famous windows, window that one gets when you first load a CD rom, asking what you want to do with certain files. If I choose nothing, the restoring operation ceases........if I choose open with windows player or some other program, my hard drive then does some operations and after a while the restoration process is also done. I could never actually do a complete restoration on my external drive. Maybe this is normal and the destintation disk must be a different one.

    Thanks again for any comments.
     
  4. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    As I said, you don't want to clone the drive. A clone is exactly the same as the original and you could only make one clone at a time. That's not a good backup strategy where you want several backups over time. Images are much smaller than the whole drive because they are only the used sectors and furthermore compressed. Your external hard drive will hold quite a few images of you internal C drive, so you can make regular backups.

    The image is everything on the intermal drive. The operating system, data, configuration settings, e-mail, address books, programs, etc. When you restore an image, you put everything back just the way it was when the image was made.
    ]Yes, you cannot restore an image to a disk that has the image on it. In the restore process, the current partition is deleted and then the image is written in its place. Of course, when the partition is deleted, the image would also be deleted, so there would be nothing to restore.

    If you want to test the restore process, you should first make an image of your entire internal hard drive and save it on the external drive. Then replace your internal drive with a different drive and restore the image to the replacement drive. You will see that you have a fully operational system.

    Of course, that's probably more work than you want to do to test the restore process. Most of the time, we just use the CheckImage function to verifythe image and then Explore the image to confirm that we can see the data files. If you can successfully check the image and Explore the image, it is as close as you can get to a gold plated guarantee that the image will restore successfully when needed.
     
  5. Confused Coloner

    Confused Coloner Registered Member

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    John:

    I would like to Thank You very much for your very precise and easy to understand replies to my question. My question has been answered by you and I now totally understand how it all works and also feel confident that if I had a hard drive crash I would be back in business soon.

    Thanks again
    Eric
     
  6. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Hi Eric,

    I'm glad I could help, and thanks for letting me know it was useful.

    Check back here if you have any more questions. By the way, True Image Version 9 has been released. If you purchased Version 8 within the last 30 days, you get a free upgrade to Version 9.
     
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