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Backup - which one?

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New to backup software.

With the Home Edition - what do i use to backup the complete drive so I can just reinstall the data on a new drive if my original fails or is unusable?
Is it written in one file (ie. and iso file)? or does it write each individual sector for the complete drive.

What I am looking for is, if the hard drive i use (after making a backup) for my system crashes and buy a new hard drive, will this software put back together ALL of the new hard drive without missing a beat?

If I backup my drive more than one time do I need to put each drive image on a different media or can I put the differnet times of a complete backup on a single source (backup hard drive) and revert to which backup i want to restore.

Sorry for all the questions, but being a newbie at this I need all the assistance I could use.

Thank you and God bless,
Craig

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Craig Wojo wrote:
What do i use to backup the complete drive so I can just reinstall the data on a new drive if my original fails or is unusable?

You need 2 things:
- a disk and partition backup of the disk in the computer that contains the OS and applications. Include all the partitions in the disk. To do that, click on create a disk and partition backup, click on the blue link in the upper right corner to switch to disk mode, select the disk.
- an Acronis recovery CD (can be the CD you received ATI on) that you have tested: you have booted your computer on it and you have restored a couple of files from it.

Is it written in one file (ie. and iso file)? or does it write each individual sector for the complete drive.

Each time you backup, ATI will create a TIB file. That is an archive that contains all the low-level sector information of your disk that you need to restore.

What I am looking for is, if the hard drive i use (after making a backup) for my system crashes and buy a new hard drive, will this software put back together ALL of the new hard drive without missing a beat?

Yes.

If I backup my drive more than one time do I need to put each drive image on a different media or can I put the differnet times of a complete backup on a single source (backup hard drive) and revert to which backup i want to restore.

You can store all the TIB files on a single disk. Preferably a big USB disk.

Check this thread as well.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/25648

If you are new to backup, you should read grover's guides in the left side of this conversation. Also read the user manual. Imaging software requires some training to avoid serious issues. Not very complicated but you have to go through the learning.