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Best Settings for HD Clone

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I have been having issues with TrueImage 2020 (latest build) and the phone support has been less than helpful in setting up a backup that actually works.

 

The computer I'm trying to backup:

I have a Window 7 Pro 32bit computer that does just one task. The HD is 250 GB but the used space is only 35 GB. I have True Image 2020 installed in Windows and I am using the latest version.

 

Goal:

To do a full image backup of this computer every night at 6pm to an external USB 5TB Seagate Drive. I would like to do three backups and then have it delete the oldest image on the 5TB drive.

If the current HD dies, I want to be able to take the newest backup image on the 5TB drive, write it to a brand new HD, put the new HD into the computer, and boot just like nothing happened.

 

My Current Settings:

Schedule: Daily at 6pm
Backup: Custom Scheme, Full Backup, Store no more than 3 recent version
Advanced: Backup sector by sector, No backup of unallocated space

Will this meet my goal of writing the newest backup image to a brand new HD, put the new HD into the computer, and boot just like nothing happened?

 

Thanks!

 

 

0 Users found this helpful

Mark, welcome to these public User Forums.

Your scheme should work fine but there is no need to use the 'Sector-by-Sector' method as this will be triggered automatically if ATI encounters any disk errors such as bad sectors.  A downside of using sector by sector is that it normally disables compression, so results in larger backup files. (I do not use this myself except in situations where I am trying to image a failing disk drive and am seeing too many error messages for bad sectors).

One important point regarding automatic cleanup, 'Store no more than 3 recent version chains' will only delete the oldest file(s) after a new full backup for a 4th chain has been created successfully, so your backup drive must have sufficient free space to hold 4 chains, which from your size of data and drive should be no issue, so you could increase that number of recent chains if wanted, especially if the data size of 35GB includes the system pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys large files (which are excluded by default and rebuild on boot by Windows).

I would only do sector by sector for forensic reasons or when trying to rescue accidentally deleted files (in case something goes seriously pear-shaped).