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Surface Pro 4 Image?

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Hello smart people,

We have a photo booth company.  Our booths run on five separate 128gb Surface Pro 4s.  Each has it's own licensed software for each machine.  I'm fairly techie but not as much as you guys.  I have True Image 2021. 

What's the best way to create a full backup image of each Surface?

Should I use five separate USB thumb drives or can all images be stored on one large external drive? 

I'm not sure how to use the Acronis Survival Kit and boot media, or if it can be used to host five backups on one external drive or not. 

Thank you for the help! 

2 Users found this helpful

Nick,  welcome to these public User Forums.

If you have ATI 2021 installed on each of your 5 Surface Pro 4 systems, assuming that they run a supported OS (Windows or Mac OS), then you could setup a scheduled backup task on each PC to write backup images to either a large external drive or if connected to a network, to a NAS on that network.

You can create a Survival Kit on such an external backup drive but to do so, you need ATI 2021 installed as the option for this is only shown when making a new backup to the drive.

When using a shared drive, then it is best to use a separate folder on the drive for each different PC writing to it, so that any confusion about the files is avoided, especially when needing to do any recovery.

The option to create a Survival Kit is only offered when you are creating a new Disks & Partitions (or Entire PC) type backup task and are setting the Destination for the task to a suitable external USB drive that can be used for this purpose.

See KB 61639: Acronis True Image: how to create Acronis Survival Kit - for more information on the process.
Also KB 61738: Acronis True Image: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems
And Acronis Article:  The Acronis Survival Kit

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media which also applies to the Survival Kit media.