"John D99" wrote in message
m...
I've got Acronis True Image 9.
I want to backup my standalone's o/s to a diferent physical harddrive
on the machine, with the priority being on simplicty and actually
being able to re-install when the o/s goes bad, or won't boot, a year
or two from now. The o/s is only about 7 gigs, and I've got lots of
space, so that's not an issue.
I have looked over the Acronis material, and even used their online
chat to ask about a straightforward way of doing it, without really
coming away with anything I want to operate on.
Can anybody give me a few streps and some overview info on this?
It's all spelled out in Chapter 4 of the manual. Section 4.2 on p.22
covers how to perform an image backup.
Clone versus image?
Cloning is an option, but IMO it's not that practical. Just make an
image of the drive. Store the image on an external hard drive. This way,
you'll be able to store *other* things on the external hard drive, too.
In addition to the image of the pristine state, you should get into the
habit of making regular images because you will be installing new
programs and creating and storing new data over time. Suppose it's two
years down the road and your system is still stable. You have tons of
different kinds of data on it, all sorts of programs, security updates,
settings to any number of things configured just the way you like it.
Imagine you have an image of the entire hard drive. Now imagine
something bad happens (could be anything that results in your not being
able to boot up). As long as you have the image on an external hard
drive, all you need to do is boot off the Acronis CD and you can restore
the image to your hard drive and everything will be as it was right
before the disaster.
How to for a boot disk..
That's in Section 10.2 on pp. 55-56.
what to do when a failure happens, etc.
No offense, but RTFM. After reading it, then ask your questions (if you
still have any). Once you roll up your sleeves and use the product, you
will start to feel very comforable with it.
The only thing I would add is later on down the road, you may find you
don't like the boot CD. In my case, restoration takes quite a while when
using their Linux-based emergrency CD. That's why I burned my own
custom-made Bart PE CD with an Acronis True Image plugin. The
restoration process is much quicker when using that particular boot CD.
Some tweaks were necessary, though. I needed the latest build of Version
9 (at the time, it was 3854). After registering, Acronis gave me a link
to download it. I also needed to obtain two DLLs that Acronis didn't
include for their plugin (!) -- MSVCP71.DLL and MSVCR71.DLL and made the
following additions to the acronis.inf file:
files\Drivers\msvcr71.dll=2,,1
files\Drivers\msvcp71.dll=2,,1
Keep in mind, that the above is only for "later on down the road!"
(Building a BART PE emergency boot CD is a different matter. I just
brought it up so you know there are workarounds to the CD that Acronis
provides.)
For now, just familiarize yourself with the program and use it. Schedule
incremental imaging backups, too. And as Leonard stated, the Acronis
forum would be the best place to ask questions:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com:80/forumdisplay.php?f=65