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Saving/restoring disk image from external drive

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I've recently had to recover my C: drive from a saved image on D: (my Acronis Secure Zone is on D:). This all worked well and saved me having to completely rebuild C:.

What I'd like to be able to do is save one or more "reference build images" (for example a clean build of Windows, and a clean build of Windows plus basic apps) onto an external drive, and then be able to recover from these if needed, while at the same time keeping recent images in the secure zone on D:. The external drive would either be a usb hdd or a NAS drive. The reference images would be a full backup.

Can I do this? What's the best way? Can I recover from these external reference images directly, or would I have to copy them back to the secure zone first, and what if the system was so badly messed up that Windows won't even start?

It would be nice if I could copy an existing full image from the secure zone onto the external drive? I have one for a known working build after a full malware cleanup, but in due course that will get overwritten by more recent working images.

Using ATI Home v10, with XP SP3. My working data files are all backed up by other means, I just use ATI for image backups of the system files.

Thanks for any advice.

(I'm a bit of a newbie, so keep it simple please!)

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David,
For assistance, click on my signature index below and look at the items listed under 3-A. The guides can be quite helpful.

It is not easily possible to copy files into or out of the secure zone. However, you can create backups from either within Windows or when booted into the Acronis Recovery CD. These backups can be stored at an alternate external location of your choosing.

Likewise, these backups can be accessed via Windows or the Acronis Recovery CD and be restored onto your old or used to create a new disk. Be absolutely certain that you boot into the Recovery CD and restore a test file or two (now) to make sure that your disks are all visible and accessible via the CD you don't have any surprises that you cannot see your drives when a crisis comes.

In order to duplicate into a new disk, you should have a backup of your entire system partition (at the very least) as it will include your boot files for XP. I prefer to have at least one backup which includes all partitions on the system disk.

Thanks GroverH - LOTS of interesting stuff there to wade through.

Had a look at the "Creating a Bootable USB Hard Drive" document which seemed like a good option to explore, until I got to the point of having made a bootable USB stick and then found my bios doen't support booting from usb...grrr!

Still, I know the ATI recovery CD works, just need to check that it can see USB drives.

Cheers, David