Which product is right for this situation?

Hi there,

The hard drive has been going on my computer. I bought a new drive and an enclosure a couple of months ago so I could clone it and just have it on hand and I'm finally getting around to it now. I'm considering purchasing one an Acronis product to handle this operation but I'm not sure which one I should choose.

Basically it's the main drive on my computer that is partitioned with a recovery partition. I'd like to keep that structure with the recovery partition. Right now I will have to clone it hooked up as an external drive. I was watching a video about Acronis True Image's ability to clone drives and it mentioned that cloning a bootable drive to an external drive was not possible - I don't have the space to put this drive inside my machine for the cloning process, so what are my options to be able to clone this drive so I can boot from it later when I switch out the drives? I hope you understand what I'm trying to do. Basically I have the new drive in an external enclosure just for the cloning procedure. Once the cloning is complete I want to swap out the drives since I think my current drive is on its last legs. I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to this stuff, so am I worried about this for nothing? Also, which version of True Image would be best, the regular or Premium? What would be the advantage of going with the Premium for me?

I was also checking out Acronis Migrate Easy - would that be a better fit for what I want to accomplish? It sounds like it can do everything I'd like it to, but maybe there's something I'm missing.

One last thing, I've been getting some I/O errors when I've been trying to just clean up the drive - will this cause a problem when I try to clone it? Can I even clone it with these errors?

Thanks for any advice!