Hi Lou - unfortunately, there is no sheduling of clones, only backups.  Here's why:

1) When you start a clone process from within Windows using Acronis, the system must reboot into ASRM (Acronis Startup Recovery Manager) as the primary disk needs to be offline / idle to do the clone.  

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/#30481.html

By default, Acronis True Image shuts down the computer after the clone process finishes. This enables you to change the position of master/subordinate jumpers and remove one of the hard drives.​

On a side note, I would not recommend starting a clone or a full disk backup from Windows... loading ASRM temporarily overwrites the Windows OS bootloader to point the system to boot to Acronis.  If the system fails to launch into Acronis for some reason, it may not automatically revert back to the original Windows bootloader, leaving you with an unbootable system.  Most times, you can resolve this by running Windows startup repair to resolve this, but why take the chance/risk, especially if it's going to cause more work.  

When doing a cline or full disk backup, I would recommend using your offline recovery media as this avoids this potential scenario and is just as easy to start.

2) When performing a clone, you should NOT leave both disk installed in the machine when booting into Windows.  Some people do this anyway, and it may work.  HOwever, after a clone, both drives have the same hardware ID and appear to the bios as the same exact drive - which can confuse it.  As a result, it might overwrite the bootloader and leave one or both unbootable... or you may end up booting into the wrong drive at some point without knowing it.  This could leave you putting data or making changes to the drives than expected.  

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#27719.html

Cloning a disk containing the currently active operating system will require a reboot. In that case, after clicking Proceed, you will be asked to confirm the reboot. Canceling the reboot will cancel the entire procedure. By default, Acronis True Image shuts down the computer after the clone process finishes. This enables you to change the position of master/subordinate jumpers and remove one of the hard drives.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#21822.html

And this one explains the best process and the limitations as well:

2931: Cloning Laptop Hard Disk

Lou, welcome to these user forums.

Sorry, but it is not possible to schedule a Clone operation as you are asking, this is something that has to be done using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media outside of Windows.

What you can do is to schedule a full disk & partitions backup of your C: drive and write the backup archive image file (.TIB) to your second hard drive.  This will never be a bootable drive as the archive image is simply a container holding the backup of the C: drive, similar to a zip file.  Should you have a problem with the C: drive, you can then restore the backup file back to that drive.

Please see KB document: 1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone which will help you to better understand the difference in these methods, plus has some video tutorials of both.

I seemed to remember that scheduled cloning was possible in True Image 11

Am I correct?

Not that I'm aware of.  Never seen it in the support documentation, but have only been actively using since 2013.

We're several products in now and as you've noticed (I'm sure) 2015/2016 interface is different.  We're also far past XP with more in depth OSes that are much different than XP (Windows 8.1 / Windows 10) and now have UEFI/GPT in addition to Legacy/MBR capable bios and Operating systems.

It's been discussed in older forums, but it's not natively supported in the application.  You might be able to get fancy with creating a Windows scheduled task to start the process, but the described work-a-round in the following post may help in your efforts.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/6799#comment-24071

I wouldn't recommend it though.. and the reason it's probably not supported is ACronis doesn't want you to boot with 2 identical disks because it can corrupt the bootloader on either (or both) and/or you may automatically boot to the wrong one at some point if the bios decides to use the clone since it will show up as the same drive.

Lou, fully agree with the comments from Rob above, plus have checked the ATIH 11.0 User Guide and there is definately no mention of being able to schedule a clone operation.  I suspect that there may be a little confusion over terminology here as some users tend to use clone & backup as if they are the same.

See KB document: 1540: Difference between Backup and Disk Clone which is helpful for describing the key differences between the processes involved in backups and clones.

I really appreciate everyone's replies.

I have been using ATI since the very early version; might have been 15-20 years ago. I can't recall exactly which version but I was able to schedulae a full disc clone to my second hard drive. So in the event of a hard drive failure (and I did have one once) I would be able to install the jumper on my back up hard drive and just boot up from that.

Seemed like the best and easiest way to have redundant security in the fewest amount of steps.

But I am openminded to better ways from people who know more than me.

Any suggestions???

Lou, I too have been using ATI for a very long time since some of the very early versions but I have never come across an option that allowed a scheduled disk clone.  As stated previously, disk clone is only possible outside of Windows using either the Rescue Media or ASRM / temporary Linux OS boot environment.  This is an iteractive process to perform the clone so you cannot just schedule the operation.

The second issue here is in booting a system with two 'identical' disk drives (down to having the same disk signature) - this is known to cause potential drive corruption and can result in an unbootable system because data can be updated on the wrong drive.

When cloning the advice is always to disconnect one of the drives before attempting to boot into Windows.

In terms of being able to just installing jumpers on the disk drive, that is old technology with PATA/IDE drives - newer SATA drives do not have any jumpers and take their boot priority from the cable connector / controller they are connected to in conjunction with BIOS / UEFI settings.

ATIH provides both clone and backup capabilities - you could still create a manual clone to a second drive and keep that stored safely in a safe, or you can restore a backup image to that second drive to create the same backup bootable spare drive.

I think I am leaning toward exactly that.

I'll perform a monthly clone and put the HD away. And schedule regular daily or weekly backups. Do you have any opinions on a good, thorough and easy backup scheme?

It really boils down to how often you need/want them to run and how much space you have to store backups and retain older ones. 

For me, I do a weekly full +  6 daily incrementals.  I have automatic cleanup turned on and keep 4 version chains (4 weeks) that run to a local hard drive. 

I have a second backup to a NAS that does a weekly full (different day than the first one) and 2 differentials per week, but also have automatic cleanup turned on and keep 4 version chains.

I then have daily cloud backps of my user profile and another weekly cloud backup of the entire system.  

I also try to do an offline backup once a week (give or take) and store it to a USB drive that only connects for the purpose of the offline backups.

There's really no wrong or right way to do it, but if you have the space, diversifying a bit doesn't hurt.  

I have a 500G SATA HD with about 77G of data. My ATI is set to a single scheme backup every other day and it will overwrite the old copy.

Also I'm curious why the backup only shows 49G to be backed up while my HD shows 77 G worth of data.

Should me HD totally become umuasable how do I go about restoring my backup to a new HD?

Lou, please look more closely at your HDD drive file / folder sizes and you may well see that the difference between your total size used of 77GB and the Acronis backup size of 49GB can be accounted for by the items which Acronis excludes from the backup plus the compression used by Acronis which can be upto around 20%.

Files such as pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys, swapfile.sys plus System Volume Information folders are excluded by default and can add up to many gigabytes in size.

Thanks,

Any guidance about how to put this on a bare hard drive to mimic my old one in case of a hard drive failure?

You would now restore the backup to the bare hard drive.  Since this is disk restore, recommend that you do this with your offline recovery media.  Full disk restores typcially require the system to reboot and if you do this in Windows, it will modify the Windows bootloader, load Acronis and attempt the restore.  If Acronis fails to load for some reason, it might not automatically replace the Windows bootloader, so avoid this potential pitfall by just starting with your recovery media.

Here are some sample videos of how to do offline backups and/or restores:

Britec - How To Restore Windows 10 from a System Image - YouTube

SunGod2009 - How to backup and restore using Acronis True image - YouTube