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Can TI2013 do this? If yes, how?

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So here's what I have:

Laptop running Win 8 with 1 TB HDD - only 1 drive in it ("C"). About 80 GB full.
500GB External HDD holding about 200 gigs of media. Rest ~240 is allocated for small backups of WIndows System Image
1 TB internal HDD in an enclosure.

Here's what I want now:

Create monthly clone on my laptop on to the 1 TB HDD. This is the my-hd-crashed-and-i-need-to-submit-a-paper-tonight backup. In a case when my laptop stops working, I should be able to just swap out the hard drives, and the computer should work flawlessly. No need to reintall Windows, activate it, reinstall software etc. Complete clone. You get the idea.

Create weekly backups of above mentioned clone, but be able to retrieve individual files from it as well, on demand. This is for when I accidentally delete something and recover individual files/folders, and be able to perform a complete recovery of the disk image. This will be saved on the 500 gig hard drive I have.

I have no if TI2013 can do these. If they can, please let me know how, and what all I'll need to recover the backups, like usb bootable drives etc etc.. I'm new to all this, so please dumb down technical stuff as well.

Thanks

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No. You can't Clone on an automated schedule. Nor should you.

My best advice: Do not Clone! Instead, do one extra step and create a full disk Backup to an external drive. If ever you need to return to that image state, you would do a full disk Restore/Recovery.

There is rarely a need to Clone. Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they had instead used Backup.

1. Don't use Clone. Do a full disk Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.

A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.

The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.

Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.

Instead, set up a scheduled full disk mode backup.

Well I did read a lot of tutorials, even saw videos, but I don't know how would I go about recovering the disk backups.

Let's say I have 3 different disk backups (as you suggested) in my HDD (which also has my media files). Now let's create 2 hypothetical situations:

1. I accidentally deleted a file from computer. I need to restore that file from one of my backups.
2. My Windows is corrupted, and won't boot.
3. My hard disk is burned. Or dead, and needs to be replaced.

How would I go about restoring the backups in each case?

The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

Can you elaborate on these advantages, please?

Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots. Both manual and Grover's guides show how to Restore. Essentially you'd boot from the Rescue Media, select a backup and restore it to the PC's hard drive.

Advantages? I already listed some:

With Backups, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility. Instead of reliance on a single cloned drive, you have multiple backups, from different dates, to choose from.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive. Making a Backup is entirely safe.