Hard drive failure

It is your Entire PC image which will be needed to create a new system disk if yours should fail. Be sure to keep it current and you should keep more than 1 copy--such as several Entire PC backups. If you want to have everything recovered, then you need a backups which contains everyting and a backup which is "Entire PC" has everything.

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Section 1:
In the event of failure of your system disk, you would need
1. Remove old hard drive and replace with new hard drive.
2. Boot into True Image via booting the TI Recovery CD.
3. Select Recovery from the TrueImage Options.
4. Browse to the storage location of the Entire PC Backup--wherever you have it located--perhaps an external USB disk.
5. Restore the Entire PC Backup onto the new disk.
6. Reboot your new disk.
This process may be covered in my signature link #3, item 2 inside that link.
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Section 2:
So in order to be prepared, there are some steps you need to take NOW to make sure things work as intended--
should you have a need to replicate your current system disk.

A. Attach the storage device which contains your Entire PC backup.
B. As the recovery tool is the TI Recovery CD, you need to boot your current computer with the TI Recovery CD.
C'. From the TI CD Menu, Select Recovery and browse to the location where the Entire PC backup is stored.
and select the TI backup.
D. The purpose of these steps is to make sure your tib backup file can be found and accessed.

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Section 3:
As to the next steps,
at the very least, you should restore a couple test files from the Entire PC Backup so you know that it can be done.

Some users go much further in their testing and restore a entire new disk, or some partitions or some folders or several files.
You have to make that choice.
When you are done with the open TrueImage, you can click the cancel option
Remove the CD from the tray and boot into Windows.
My signature link 3, and inside that link, item 3 and 5 shows how to restore only partitions or files.
There is a learning curve with TrueImage so a review of its web help files, and some of the postings on the forum can assist.
Other links in my signature can also help.

It is imperative to test your backups because if it doesn't work, your just wasting your time.

I test restored multiple times to a couple old hard drives as well as deleted backups and started over before I decided on which backup scheme and its settings to use. A lot of reading both here and other sites how to do proper backups.
My only intention for doing backups is to save me the headache of reinstalling windows along with all the other programs. When it's all said and done, the only way to know that everything works is to test restore.

Thank your very much for a rapid and clear response.

May I assume the new HDD I would place in my PC in case of HDD failure could have a larger capacity?
There would no need for me to try to learn creation of a clone using TI 2015?

Peter

Thanks

Good advice

peter

Well I would advise learning every aspect of doing backups, cloning, full backups, incrementals, so that when and if your C drive fails or gets corrupted (it will) you understand all the details to restore everything and which way is best for you in your situation.

"May I assume the new HDD I would place in my PC in case of HDD failure could have a larger capacity?
There would no need for me to try to learn creation of a clone using TI 2015?"

Usually yes but as long as the replacement drive is large enough to hold the actual data that's in the backup, Acronis can restore to it.
Example is, I have a 500 Gig C drive backed up. It has only 70 gigs of actual space used on that drive so Acronis can restore to a (smaller) 120 gig drive just fine.
The 120 Gig drive is what I use to test restore. I've also done the same with a 300 gig drive and a 1 TB drive.

Acronis backup is very good software, so far I find it is second to none, but users need to take the necessary time to learn how it's been designed to work to stay out of trouble.
Often times, which happened to me once, operating system corruption can cause problems with backups being done properly, same is true with hardware and other software problems or driver problems or conflicts.
THE key is to test the backups.

Oh your one question was about cloning, I haven't even explored that feature yet.
So far I see no need In my situation since restoring the c drive from both a local backup and from cloud work very well.
Restore from a local backup takes me about an hour to a ssd drive, about 2-3 hours to a regular spinning drive. Cloud restore is about the same with my 300 down internet connection.

Sure beats reinstalling everything, which takes me several hours over the course of a few days.

I understand that I will need a T1 Recovery CD to restore my data from backups stored externally if my hard drive fails.  How do I create the recovery CD?

Paul, welcome to these User Forums.

Please see KB 48338: Acronis True Image 2015: Creating Acronis Bootable Media