Cloning Windows 8.1 Partitions onto *the same hdd*?
Hi folks,
the net being full of advice how to clone the partitions of any operating system to another hdd, and TrueImage itself offering suitable information concerning this, I still have a similar but nonetheless not covered question:
For some experiments with my already existing os-configuration (Win 8.1) and Software-Testing I would like to copy it to another partition *onto the same hdd* (on the same computer & with completely identical hardware therefore), in order to temporarily have (and keep!) the same resp. original environment untouched (if something should go wrong, for instance and aside from the fact, that its only for testing).
My idea thus, simply said is - instead of later on having one Windows 81 and Windows 7 or whatever on my system - to have two identical operating systems to be chosen from by an additional boot-manager at startup
Do you regard things like this possible and - if not to be done with TrueImage - by use of GParted or something similar?
Thanks for your ideas.
Cheers
JS
"I would like to copy it to another partition *onto the same hdd*"
You cannot clone from the same drive back to itself- it must be a different destination. The alternative, would be to to take a full disk or partition backup which will be saved in Acronis compressed .tib format and you can save that wherever you like. However, it won't let you save your image to the same disk either if it is a full disk backup being taken from the offline bootable media.
In Windows, you can take a backup (not a clone) of the source disk and save the backup to the same drive. However, it would not be a sound practice to image or backup a disk to itself - even if possible. 1) you are modifying the source disk as it is being imaged so that's not the best idea. 2) if your only backup image resides on the source disk and the source disk is corrupted, lost, stolen, or fails, you have no original data and no backup now since they were in the same place.
Best backup practices require a secondary disk to store your backup or clone too. Please take a look at the standard 3-2-1 recommendation which is the very basic backup practice for most situations.
Otherwise, you may just want to copy the original data to another location on the same drive for safekeeping. This is not a backup, but a copy. Acronis is not a copy product though, it is a backup product. Robocopy is a free command line utility in Windows already that's pretty easy to use. Alternatively, Allway Sync is another free third party applicaiton (there are many others) you can use to copy from one directory to another, but please use Acronis for Backups before you make any changes to important or critical data as that is going to be your restore/recovery point in case things go bad.