Secure Zone Size required for backing up multiple systems to one large exterior hard drive?
I've been asked by a friend that owns 5 computers if they could use True Image Home 11 to save an individual Back-Up from each of the 5 computers, entire full back-up "Disk & Partitions", on one large exterior USB hard drive. The questions I would ask are as follows: If a huge Secure Zone was created, would you add up the total hard drive sizes, IE: 250GB + 250GB + 500GB + 300GB+ 200GB = 1.5TB, telling me you must have a 1.5 Terra Byte sizes Secure Zone, or something smaller? The intent her would be to be able to restore any of the 5 computers to original condition in the event of a total hard drive failure which required installing a brand new hard drive in one of the systems and using Acronis to put back all partitions and data on the new drive just as they were previously. Is this feasible and would it work? Is the needed Secure Zone size dependent on the amount of actual data space used on each system drive or the actual full hard drive size whether the space is being used or not, thus reaching the 1.5TB size requirement? Any help would be appreciated as I'm trying to help a friend and convince them to purchase Acronis rather then Norton Ghost.
Pat, I appreciate your expertise, I just want to make sure that I'm very clear with your advice. The total hard drive size for all 5 PC's comes out to 1.5TB. The plan would be to do weekly incremental updates on one of those computers that has the 500GB drive in it. So, if I understand what you are telling me, the total space taken to initially store a complete disc copy, including all partitions, for each PC, would be around 750GB or less. With that being said, knowing she wants to do incremental updates in addition on one of those PC's which has a 500GB hard drive installed, it should not be an issue space wise, if she purchased a 1.5TB drive, which should leave about 750GB free space for the incremental back-ups. Is this correct and feasible, or should she purchase a 2TB drive to be safe? This will work in the event of a total hard drive / hardware failure and allow a new hard drive to use that saved copy to just load everything back on very simply correct? Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing back from you soon on these few follow-up questions. I really, really, appreciate your help, expertise, and time!!! Hollywood
Hollywood,
What counts is the size of the data on the disks, not the size of the disks. The full TIB backup size is typically less than the size of the original data.
If she wants to do incremental backups, she needs about 2.5 times the size of the full TIB backup size. This corresponds to a setting where the backup scheme is custom, incremental, do a new full every X (to be define) incrementals, turn on auto-cleaning, store no more than 1 most recent backup chain.