Multiple drive mirror images on one large backup drive?
I am running 4 home computers each with different sized hard drives. Each is 250 gigs or smaller in size. They include a netbook a notebook and two desktops each with XP. I have bee running Acronis Home 9 since July. My question is this.
Is it possible to create a mirror image full backup of each of the 4 hard drives and save them to one large ( 1 terabyte) external drive ) and then be able to access and copy to any required replacement drive in case of a crash? Can a 250 gig image be copied to a 500 gig drive and still have the entire 500 gig available or would it be partitioned as a 250?
These images would be strictly for back up and replacement of the hard drives. Not for incremental/differential use.
Thanks for any information you may offer!
Thanks much, Mark. Maybe I didn't make myself clear or maybe I'm misunderstanding your reply. I believe you are referring to a partition (file) backup. I was referring to sectors and all ie a complete mirror image of the hard drive not just the files. For example. I have a 200 gig drive with 160 gigs free. I can create the partition backup with only 40 gigs needed but if I do the sectors I need 200 gigs of storage space. Could I partition a one terabyte drive into four 250 gig partitions and create a mirror of each of the 4 hard drives? Like I say, I'm a newbie with Acronis and not at all familiar with it, even after reading the manual, although I'm having no trouble using it on all 4 machines. I just can't find any info to clarify my question. I am aware that normally a mirror image of a hard drive has to be made on a hard drive at least the equal of the original. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks again!
Ron
Ron:
I wasn't referring to a file-based backup, but rather to an image-based backup. One of the advantages of TrueImage is that it does not include unused sectors in the image file, so you can indeed store a complete image of a 200 GB hard disk having 160 GB free in a compressed image file that is even smaller than 40 GB. This is an image of the disk; not just a copy of the files, and thus it is capable of being restored to a bare-metal drive and will completely recover everything on the original drive.
The output of TI is just a file, so you can store multiple images on a single hard disk. Partitioning of this storage drive is not needed and there is no advantage in doing so. You can keep the images separate by keeping them in different folders, or however you like to keep things organized.
...I am aware that normally a mirror image of a hard drive has to be made on a hard drive at least the equal of the original. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
This is definitely not true. Imaging software like TI only includes used sectors in the image file, so the output file is smaller than the source disk. In many cases, it can be quite a bit smaller. For an example, the laptop that I'm typing this reply on has 7 partitions for Windows 7, Linux, and data partitions. The disk is 160 GB. If I create an image of all 7 partitions the result is a 20 GB file. This single file can restore each and every partition on the disk, one at a time or all together, to a new, blank hard disk.
You may have been confusing imaging with cloning. Cloning is very space-inefficient because a clone is an exact copy of a disk and thus consumes an amount of space equal to the source disk. You can store only one clone of a disk on another disk, whereas you can store multiple image copies of a disk or disks on a single destination disk.
Hope this helps.
Mark! Thanks a million. This is greatly appreciated information. This is certainly good news!!
I have a much better understanding of the process now.
Hi,
I just purchased True Image and I am just trying to get familiar with it. I had a similar question as Ron although I am already a bit familiar with the basic concept of the fact that the image is as you said, just a file, and is much smaller than the complete size of the source drive.
My concern is organization and my question is how to create the folders on the destination drive that will contain the images so they will be organized in named folders that describe the various PC's being imaged? I think I have figured this out actually, but I want to know for sure if I am on the right track and maybe you can explain the simplest method.
The one small complaint of the program I have so far, is that the interface seems to deviate a little too much from a conventional windows explorer type folder structure. That might not be the best way to describe what I mean... It just seems to me that by trying to make the interface so simple, they have deviated from logical intuitive methods to customize the organization. When one does a one click backup, I think there should be a little more obvious option to create a sub folder on the destination drive to achieve better organization when imaging multiple systems onto one external drive. Maybe I am just tired and missed something???
I appreciate your time in responding.
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Bud
Bud:
The 2011 User Guide describes the steps needed to make an image backup in section 3.3 on pages 39 - 40. To do what you describe you would choose the Destination drop-down list shown in the figure on page 39 and direct the program to store the image in the location of your choice. You can find a link to the User Guides in the left column of the forum pages under "Useful Links".
If you do it this way then you can organize your images in any way that makes sense to you. You could, for example, create a folder for each PC and keep all of its images in the folder. Or, you could include the name of the PC in each file name, and instead organize in folders by month. Or you could dump all of the images into one giant folder. Choose whichever organizational method makes sense to you. You can set up your desired folder structure using Windows Explorer to create the folders ahead of time if you like.
Since you're new to the program I would highly recommend reading some of forum MVP Grover's guides. You can find them here: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3426
Hope this helps...