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Question about the nature of the backup

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Hi Acronis Forumgoers!

I recently downloaded the trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2012, and I am strongly considering upgrading to the real deal, because who doesn't want a safe and secure backup? However, I have a slightly pressing issue, and a basic question to go along with it. Soon, I will be sending my laptop in for repairs (just an audio jack problem), but there is the possibility that my hard drive will be wiped in the repair process. My question is: will I be able to completely restore *everything* that I currently have after the hard drive is wiped? I'm not sure how backups work, so I don't know if they rely on some data still being on the drive or not.

Thank you all for you time and help!

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Sure, I've done it many times. That's one of the great benefits of Acronis True Image Home. In fact, I've restored full disk backups to a new, blank, unformatted drive, replaced after the original drive failed.

You would want to perform a "Disk and partition backup", selecting the entire disk (so that it includes all partitions, even hidden ones).

After making such a backup, validate it and try restoring a few files to make sure you can do so on your hardware. Check out the guides linked in the left column of the forums pages, especially:

ATIH 2012 - Getting Started, and follow the steps in the section "Making sure that your rescue CD can be used when needed"

And, Grover's guides are excellent, complete with many screenshots illustrating various steps.

An external HD is the best place for it! I make all my ATIH backups to an external HD. It would be crazy to try to image my entire system disk to CD-R or even DVD-R, as it would use way too many disks.

The recovery process is detailed in various tutorials linked from the left column of this forum, as I mentioned. Briefly, you would boot from the ATIH Recovery Media ISO (burned to either CD-R or bootable flash drive), select the .tib backup from the external HD and restore it to the internal HD.

But, as I recommended, you should first follow steps to make sure all this works on your hardware. Boot from the Recovery Media and try to restore a few files. You want to know in advance that recovery works on your hardware. I've never had a problem, and have restored full systems on many computers of friends and family. But, some people do have trouble on some hardware, so you need to test it out first.