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Drive cloning and regular backups

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I am using ATIH 2012, Update 2.1 (build 7133) Full Version

I would like to know if I can clone my C drive (330 GB) to my external USB 2TB drive and continue to use the external drive for regular backups. In other words, can the destination drive be used for both cloning the C drive and doing regular backups?

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Not a good idea, because when you boot up the system with both drives attached, Windows will assign new drive letters to the resulting cloned drive. This will make the cloned drive letters different than they were on the original drive and defeat the purpose of cloning to begin with. In addition the disk signatures will be identical and this can cause problems with Windows and some applications that reference this signature.
Because you have a 2TB drive, why not make a full disk backup to your external. You then could use this in the event of hard disk failure.

As James has suggested, create a backup image file of your entire computer and that file can be stored as any other file on your 2TB.

Acronis offers two methods to creating a duplicate bootable replacement disk.
The clone method where the result of cloning will produce another identical disk (2 alike disks)
Plus the backup and restore method which will create a backup file (extension=.tib) and that file can be used to recovery the backup file onto a another target disk.

Check out this link and it illustrates how to create a backup task to produce the backup file. Note particularly figures 3-4-5 of this link. Figure 5 illustrates that the disk mode option is checked so all contents and all partitions included within the backup file.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/28705

Thank you all for the great responses, I will follow James F's suggestion and make a full disk backup to my external 2 TB USB drive.

Again, thanks to all

TC