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Trying to backup full image of laptop

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Hi,

I am new to using Acronis True Image 2017 and would appreciate some guidance. I have a laptop that I would like to take a full image of and backup that image onto an external hard drive. Here's what I've done so far. On a computer other than the one I intend to backup, I signed into to Acronis and downloaded the True Image 2017 installer. Using that same computer I plugged in a USB and chose Rescue Media Builder. My USB now has two folders, "efi" and "Recovery Manager" as well as other files and applications.

This is where I am stuck, I removed the USB from my computer and plugged it into the laptop which I intend to take an image of. I opened file explorer and navigated to the USB directory. What is the next step I need to take to backup this image? I don't see a clear choice in the USB, there's lots of applications like bootmenu and bootx64.efi but I don't know which is the correct one.

Thanks.

0 Users found this helpful

Nathan, welcome to these user forums.

Acronis True Image is intended to be installed on the laptop or computer where you want to make your backup images of, where the application can make the backup from within the running Windows application and store this on your external backup drive.

ATIH 2017 can also be used in a completely offline (from Windows) mode by creating and using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media which you then boot your laptop from in order to make the backup image.

The ATIH 2017 installer .exe file can only be used to install the application, but once installed the Rescue Media Builder tool can create two different type of Rescue Media - the standard media uses a Linux distribution which may not work on all systems, and Windows PE media which uses the Windows ADK in a way that is similar to the Windows install media and which should work on almost all systems unless some additions device drivers are needed, such as for disks using RAID or with specific types of NVMe / M.2 drives.  Only testing the rescue media to boot your laptop will show what will or won't work for you.