which tool to choose?
I've just purchased True Image 2020 and am overwhelmed with its capabilities, so I'm unsure which one of them to choose.
I have two disks on my PC; one of them (C:) contains Windows with all drivers, settings and lots of installed programs. I want to be able to restore all this to a new disk in case if the old disk dies.
Is the right way to do this cloning C: to a USB disk? I realise that in case if my C: dies, I will be able to boot from the USB disk. But will it allow me to restore the cloned C: disk to a new C: disk?
Thanks, Alex
Thanks Steve, I asked in a rush - sorry.
I've had a read of the documentation by now and I think I know what to do: backup my C: disk.
The only thing is, the cost of possible mistake is too high and I cannot really test restoring until a real misfortune with my C: disk occurs (God forbid).
Alex, you said you have two disks on your PC but you mention only one of them. Is the other going to be the target for your backup of C:, or is is another drive that you might want to back up? I would advise having an external drive as the destination of the backup. That protects you from something that damages your PC.
In the various backup schemes you should choose either a "disks and partitions" backup or (if your two drives need to be kept in sync for backup and restore purposes) "Entire PC". ("Entire PC" isn't very popular but I think it has its purposes.) You will probably want a backup scheme that creates a full backup every so often and then incremental or differential backups in between. The incr and diff backups contain contain changes since the last full backup. (There used to be a very clear distinction between incr and diff relating to speed of recovery, size of backups, vulnerability to corruption, etc., but Acronis changed both in ATI 2020 so I'm not sure what the benefits of each is. I use incr.
You will need to choose how often to create a backup, how long your chains of incr or diff backups should be, how many chains to keep, etc. This may seem like a lot of detail the first time you do it, but it's a pretty simple process and there's no "wrong" solution. Well, almost no wrong solution. I would strongly advise creating one full backups and then doing incr or diff backups forever. Something, sometime will go wrong with your one single long chain of backups and you will be left with no backups whatsoever. Not a good situation.
And make sure you create and test a backup medium. Go to the ATI tool tab and click on Rescue Media Builder. Or go to the MVP User Tools and select ATI_PE_Builder for an even more flexible recovery tool.
Thanks Patrick, for such a comprehensive explanation.
I have two drives on my PC and I do NOT intend to back up the second drive with True Image, as it only contains a few huge files and no system information; I will use just plain copying for that. What I'm concerned with is that I've spent a lot of time installing all drivers and programs on C: drive and I don't want to go through that again, should something happen with that drive. If that does happen I want to
a) get a new drive;
b) put it in the PC instead of the faulty one;
c) boot from the backup (on a USB drive) prepared by True Image;
d) restore the backup onto the new drive.
e) boot PC again, this time from the new drive.
I hope that the "disk and partitions" back up will let me do just that - would you please tell me if this is not so.