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How to Back Up Entire Drives

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I am BRAND NEW using Acronis.  I was a Norton Ghost user, but the product is no longer supported by Win 7.  I back up entire drives (C:) and (D:) daily to external hard drives.  They run in a scheduled manner.  I want to use Acronis in the same way.  If I have a hard drive failure, I want to be able to restore the drive and be on my way.  I read that Acronis 2016 does not back up email, that too is a concern.  So my question, what backup type do I need to do.

Thank you for any assitance you can provide.

 

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Welcome to this user forum and to using your Acronis product.

Please confirm which Acronis product you are using, you mention 2016 but have posted in the 2015 forum?

When you state that you want to backup entire drives C: and D: to external hard drives - were you creating a disk image of each of these drives and storing the image on the external hard drives, or were you cloning each of the drives to create an idential copy of each drive on the external hard drive?

ATIH 2016 will back up email but it has a set of default exclusions defined that may cause some user data to not be backed up if these exclusions are not changed or removed.

I would recommend reading through the ATIH 2016 User Guide for good information on how to get started with this product and also to see the range of backup and recovery options that are provided.

Please also browse through the contents of the Best Practices Forum which has a lot of excellent guides and information on the different types of backup schemes, especially Grover's True Image Guides which you can see listed in the left column of the forum.

 Thank you for the Welcome.

I should have been more clear.  I have Acronis True Image 2015 and want to backup the drives mentioned, as I did in Ghost.  What I typically had was an "image" of the drive where in the event of windows or drive failure I could copy the image to a new drive and boot from it.  All of my data and programs would then be on the drive as if it was the identical drive.  So what is the correct termonology in Acronis?  Also I asked about the 2016 version because I like to stay current, but read that email, in this case Outlook, may not be copied completely.  Any advice would be appreciated. 

Thank you again.

Thank you for the clarification.  ATIH 2015 or 2016 can do exactly what you want for it to do, it will make backup images of your entire disk drive which can be stored on any other available (internal, external or network) drive, from where it can be restored to a new drive if or when needed to recover from a whole disk failure.

There is some confusion with regard to what ATIH can do with backing up emails - the confusion arises because in some earlier versions of the product it offered a separate category for just backing up Email data but this was removed in later versions.  This does not mean that ATIH cannot backup email data from any of the available Email programs such as Outlook - it simply means that this data is now backed up by choosing either to do a Files and Folders backup and selecting the appropriate folders that hold your email data, or by doing a Disks or Partitions backup which would include all selected data on the selected drive or partition.  

The one consideration that you need to be aware of with backing up data using ATIH is to carefully check the default Exclusions that the software adopts  and to ensure that these do not include any folders that may contain data you want to protect and backup - these Exclusions include the System Volume Information (where all System Restore Point information is held) and the data folders for most common web browsers which can hold your favourites, extensions etc.

Thank you for clearing that up.  You knew exactly what was confusing me.  You certainly know the product!  Thank you for your help.