What to back up
I am getting to the point that programs are overwhelming me. I have used Acronis for years but as it gets ever more complicated/capable I am losing my grasp of it.
I am comfortable making a complete copy of my primary logical drive every time. I dont want incremental and I dont want differential backups because apparently my pea brain cant grasp the concept.
Mostly I want to be able to recover from a catastrophic failure of my OS.
My primary drive that came with my PC has a C and D drive. Obviously the OS is on the C drive and the D drive is a Windows recovery partition. They both reside on the same HDD. I want to back these up such that I can recover to my current (at the time of the backup) state.
I dont need media backup.
So I open Acronis True Image Home 2012, click on Disk and partition backup and a Configure disk backup process window appears. What shows is "OS (C)" and there is a dropdown arrow to choose the D drive in addition. The backup scheme by default is incremental, clearly I want full.
So I guess my question is C and D drive are both included? And I want a full backup...right?
Thanks for the quick reply, I appreciate it.
Heres a screen shot:
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/9504/diskmanagementscreensho.png
Your 100 MB "System" partion is the Active partition, so the system boots from there first. You would need to include that in the backup.
As I say, it's simpest to include all partitions. If data are too large and you don't need to include your data in the image, you can exclude based on directory path or file types. I exclude music files from my ATIH system images, as I have over 400 GB of music. That would make system images unnecessariily huge.
Perhaps a review of this presentation would be beneficial. The disk mode type backup would backup everything (except for exclusions) and enable you to create a replacement disk when needed.
If you don't need that Recovery partition on your laptop at all times, you could delete it and free up 13 GB of usable space. I did that on my Dell, after using their included tool to move the recovery image to DVD-R and USB flash drive, in case I ever want it. WIth that partition gone, you wouldn't have to worry about it in your backup images.
Really, the only purpose of such OEM Recovery partitions is to return the system to factory state. Once you've installed your applications, preferences, data, Windows updates, etc., the usefulness of a factory-state recovery is pretty low. It's unlikely you'd use it, instead using your Acronis True Image Home backups to restore your system rather than a factory system. But, write it to DVD or USB first, just in case you might ever want it (for example, for selling the computer).