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clone, backup, or Image?

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I assume this is a basic question which has probably been discussed before. I apologize, I searched for a discussion in the forum and I guess I am just not finding it.

I have Acronis True Image 11. My 13-year old son uses his Dell laptop (with the Vista operating system} at school. With the care a 13-year old uses with the laptop, I know a hard drive failure will occur and I want to be able to recover.- - -

I have also purchased an external USB harddrive. My goal is to create a complete copy of his current internal Dell harddrive onto the external USB harddrive. In case of a failure, I want to be able to purchase a replacment Dell internal harddrive, place it into his laptop, and then transfer back everything which had been previously copied and stored on the external USB drive. I want to be able to restart his system after coping it back to the new replacment internal Dell drive without reloading operating systems, doing setups, etc so he can again run his system and it will work as orginal per the date the copy to the USB drive had been made.

I am a bit confused. I see a "clone" option, a backup option, and discussion about harddrive imaging. What choice or program option do I want to use to copy to the USB external drive and then be able to put the information back into his computer after a failure with as little setup and hassel as possible?

Thank you.!

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Rick:

Imaging is what you want. If the external drive is big enough, you can store multiple images of your son's laptop on it.

Cloning makes a duplicate of a hard drive and is generally used when purchasing a larger hard disk and then transferring the contents of the existing (good) hard disk to the new one. It is not useful if the existing disk has gone bad, unless you want to make a duplicate copy of a bad disk.

I would avoid backing up files and folders with True Image. If you want to do this there are better ways; for example using file sync software like Karen's replicator or Microsoft SyncToy.

For your stated purpose, an image is the way to go. When creating one, TI calls this a "My Computer" backup. The output is a large file that can later be restored to the same or to a new disk. Be sure to include the entire disk in the image, in case the laptop has multiple partitions (for recovery, etc.). Check out the illustrated guides by user GroverH in the "sticky" post at the top of this forum.