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Can I create an image of a disk or not?

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I want to boot from bootable media (usb drive) tell acronis disk director 12 to take the hard drive in a system, and make a "snapshot" or "iso" or whatever you call it, and put that file on another usb drive. This way, if my machine fails, I have an image so I can replace the drive, boot from the bootable media again, and tell acronis to use the snapshot, iso file to write onto the new drive, then reboot off the new drive, and the system never notices the difference.

Is this done via cloning? do I attach the replacement hard drive to the machine via usb & "clone" the current hd to the externally attached unit? 

Can I do this with disk director 12?

thanks.

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Hello Scott,

Welcome to Acronis user forums! Sure, you can accomplish your task via cloning. Take a look at the following sources, that provide more detailed information on cloning best practices:

Acronis Disk Director 12: Disk Cloning

Cloning Best Practices 

I am sorry but the answer from Ekaterina seems a bit misleading. This first link in her response explains cloning which is not imaging. The second link talks about Acronis "True Image" products, not Acronis "Disk Director".

I am finding that I cannot make an ISO("image") or what is known as a snapshot/picture of the hard drive "data" with Acronis Disk Director. It only clones the drives. Cloning and imaging are two different things. My research tells me you have to have Acronis True Image to create an image of a drive which is a lot less data.

I was lead to believe that ADD does but now that I have had my company purchase it we are finding it does not. Please explain whether you can image or not with ADD.

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Comments: 7092

Hello Henry,

thank you for your posting! The choice here would depend on your requirements. If you need to migrate system from one drive to another, cloning would be sufficient. If your requirement is to have a continues protection of your data with the ability to revert to any point of time, then you'd likely want to set up a backup routine. In either way the product will produce an exact copy of the drive https://kb.acronis.com/content/1540 If you have some specific requirements like protecting the running databases, MS Exchange or SQL etc, we'd recommend looking at Acronis business solutions.