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Need Automated Cloning Strategy Help

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I just upgraded my laptop to a SSD drive. I will setup my old drive (same size) as an external hard disk. I want to clone my internal hard disk to my external disk nightly. My goal, if I have a drive failure, I can simply remove the drive from the external enclosure and install it in my laptop and turn it on.

What is the best way to do that with True Image Home 2011? I have not found anything about running cloning on a regular basis. Can any of the other backup methods in Acronis be setup as a bootable image on the external drive? Any advice on the simplest and most reliable method would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Courtney

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There are a few minor complications to your plan.

1. When you attach an external drive the serial number, partition info, etc. get recorded in the registry. If you try to later boot from those partitions you get a conflict because you're trying to do things from the boot C: partition, when the registry remembers that same partition as being assigned a different drive letter. I think all you have to do in that case is go into the registry and remove the old letter association, but I've never actually had to do it so I'm not sure about that. I'm also not sure if you're even able to boot far enough to edit the registry. I've heard other people having problems with that on this forum, and don't recall exactly what they did to resolve the problem. I've always used brand new drives when I've restored the OS partition to another physical drive, so I've never had to deal with that. But I think if you just swap drives in the event of a failure you will encounter this issue.

2. Cloning is very slow because every sector on the entire drive is copied, not just the used sectors.

3. Probably the best overall solution is to have a third drive available for backups, which will only copy the used sectors, so its much faster than cloning and more versatile. Then in the event of primary disk failure, wipe the partition table from the second drive, install it back in the laptop, and restore the C: partition from the third drive back onto the second drive, creating the partition table in the process with the MBR/track 0 option. I think this will avoid the problem described in number 1, but if any of the new partitions start at the same sector as one of the old (wiped out) partitions the registry may still think of them as the old letter association, so you might have to stagger the start sectors a bit to avoid that possibility.

4. another way to avoid the problem in number 1 is to have an image of the OS partition before the external disk was ever connected, thus the registry will not have the conflicting information that causes the problem. The problem with this approach is that OS copy will eventually get very outdated, so after restoring it you will have to go through dozens of Windows update operations to get the OS to the latest state.

I to am looking for this same solution, is it possible yet? or in the next software release?

You cannot schedule clone operations. The best approach, in fact, is not to use clone at all, but a disk and partition backup:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/28705

I know that clone sounds better than backup or imaging, but it is not. I know also that you need a restore operation to get your system backup when your disk dies (clone=image+restore).
IMO, the inconvenience of the time spend during restore is outweighed by the benefits of having a history of backups and the absence of risk for the source disk.

In short, image, don't clone.