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Real newbie to Acronis and am confused about products to buy for backing up C:/ drives.

Thread needs solution

Acronis offers lots of products and for the experienced to Acronis, that is good.
But getting started, is confusing.
So would appreciate help.

1. "dissimilar hardware" feature, - how does Acronis define "dissimilar"
Is a 500mg HD on a HP Pavilion laptop, "dissimilar" to a HP pavilion desktop? Does SIZE make it "dissimilar"? Or is the OS?, etc.

2. Maybe later will try to use more advanced features but to :

Backup my C: drive, OS (win 7 64bit) and data to ensure against crashes and create a bookable drive with all the same data, Do I get True Image OR Backup and recovery?

Using either product, can I partition a 500gb partition to match my laptop C: drive on a 2tb external and another partition of 1tb to match my C:/ desktop on the SAME 2tb external and back up BOTH to the same 2tb drive? And if I do, can I do an emergency boot from the partitions or ONLY do a RESTORE to the C:\ disks?

3. Data drives, USB externals backup, is it True Image or again, Backup recovery?
Multiple partitions for multiples external drive to a large 2tb external?

Would appreciate the help getting started with the right products. .

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Georgee,

1. Dissimilar means hardware, this refers to the motherboard, chipset, video card (or onboard), network chip (normally part of the motherboard). It also includes whether changing from a non RAID setup to a RAID setup and if the old PC used IDE or IDE compatability mode for Sata drives and AHCI.

2. Either will do what you want. True Image can set things up more automatically, but I suspect many people would prefer the older style interface of ABR11.5, universal restore (part of the Plus Pack for True Image) is an add on program, universal restore is enabled by hvaing the correct licence for ABR11.5.

I am assuming by 'match' you are thinking about 'copying' a drive as is, this is not how either True Image or ABR11.5 would work. A short explanation follows.

True Image home has two basic ways of 'copying' a hard drive, one, is taking a snapshot of your complete hard drive or individual partions and saving it in a tib file to another disk of your choice. This is the preferable method for a number of reasons. A tib file is a container file, think of it as a specialised zip or rar file, a tib file is normally compressed, but you can switch compression off, but that isn't recommended. With this type of imaging you can run a scheduled task(s) to keep the original image up to date for restoration purposes, you can also access the contents of the image file if needed.

The second method is cloning, which I suspect is what you are thinking of, however cloning basically works by mirroring a complete disk, it can't copy either just one partition, or save itself to a specific partition, it only works on a complete disk and will erase whatever is on the destination disk.

True Image is easy to use for either cloning or imaging, ABR11.5 is really designed for imaging, though it can clone if you want it to.

If you are cloning a drive that contains the running OS on it, you ought to use the recovery CD to make the clone, imaging the running OS drive from within Windows is fine. Recovery of any OS partition or drive should always been done using the Recovery CD or USB stick with the recovery environment on it. It is fine to recover non OS drive/partitions or clone non OS drives from within Windows.

With a disk image, assuming it contains all the partitions, that is, you've either selected all partitions or selected complete disk when making the image, each partition can be restored separately if required or the complete disk can be recovered.

3. Exactly the same ideas apply for external/NAS/Network drives as for drives inside a PC.