Sharing an External Hard Drive
Hi
I am a new user of Acronis True Image 2011 and have one copy installed on my Notebook and the Netbook version installed on my partner's Netbbok.
Is it possible to use one external hard drive to make backups for both these computers or should I purchase a second drive and use one solely for each machine?
Also, can the external hard drives be used to store other data or must they remain solely for use by True Image backups?
Hi
Many thanks for the information.
I am using a USB connected 320 Gb External Hard Disc Drive which currently has backup files from the Laptop. True Image automatically created a folder for these which contain the two backups I created - one for the partitions, and one for my files.
When I connected this drive to the Netbook it also created a folder automatically but with the same name and the files for the two machines were merged/overwritten(?) and obviously wouldn't work with either computer.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a different directory. Do you mean a unique folder on the drive with perhaps a name that would identify the Laptop and the Netbook. If so, would these folders be correctly identified during a recovery from system or disc failure using the bootable disc I created for each machine?
They will be identified by you - you boot from the bootable disc, browse to the appropriate folder and select the archive. As they all are located in the same folder, it will not have troubles with locating the whole chain.
Yes, as the others said you can use 1 external drive. However, there is a real benefit in using a second drive which would also be used for both machines - you don't have all your backups in one basket. If for some reason the 1 external drive goes bad when you need to recover you will have nothing since it is a common point of failure. A second drive gives you another chance even if the backup may be older.
EricG,
Yes by default ATI create the MyBackups folder. You can change the destination of the backups.
Go to your backup disk using windows explorere and create the folder structure you want. Eg; X:\OfficeImages and X:\LaptopImages
On the backup task, you will see a blue link "operations". Click on that, choose edit backup settings. You will see the configuration window pop up.
Click on the destination, a list of disks:\My backups\ destinations will appear. Choose browse at the bottom of that list. Using the left navigation panel, double click you way until you have opened your target directory. Then in the input box, enter a simple backup name. Eg: OfficeImage. Click OK and save. Your destination, archive file and task names will be updated.
Thanks everyone for the additional information which is very helpful.
Hi all
Just a follow up. I have now made backups of both computers on two different External Hard Drives and everything seems to be working fine. Thanks again for your help.