Stacey said:
OK, but if the system crashes how do you access the partion that has all
your stuff?
Stacey said:
When you say restore on the 2nd drive , does that mean an external hard
drive > or the hidden one? thanks again.
Stacey:
As you've heard from Big Liam and others, the Acronis True Image program is
an excellent piece of software for backing up your system. Known as a "disk
imaging program", it has the considerable advantage of backing up your
entire system -- not only the data you have created but your operating
system including the registry and your installed programs -- in short
everything that's on your day-to-day working hard drive. In effect you can
routinely "clone" the contents of your working HDD to another HDD and thus
have at hand a duplicate of your working hard drive.
So that in the event your day-to-day hard drive becomes defective for one
reason or another and is unusable, you can use your "cloned" hard drive for
full recovery. While there are many backup programs on the market, unlike a
disk imaging program such as Acronis True Image (as you have heard, there
are other disk imaging programs as well), these backup programs are
primarily
designed to backup your created data, not your operating system and
installed programs. They're fine if your interest is solely in backing up
the data you've created.
Using the Acronis program for direct disk-to-disk cloning purposes is
relatively simple & straightforward and not too terribly time consuming.
Obviously you will need another hard drive to act as the recipient of the
cloned contents of your working hard drive. While you can use another
internal hard drive for this purpose, it probably would be more practical
for you to use a USB external hard drive as the "destination" hard drive.
While the USB external hard drive would not be bootable under these
circumstances, you could clone the contents of that drive back to an
internal hard drive for restoration purposes.
As to your query about how you could recover "if the system crashes" (I'm
assuming you're referring to your HDD becoming defective and no longer
operable or so dysfunctional that it's unbootable) -- you've put your finger
on a significant problem when you use a partition on the same hard drive to
store a disk image of the drive you're backing up. While you can do that
with the Acronis program as well as other disk imaging programs, in my view
that is not a wise course of action for most users for the reason you've
alluded to. Should the source hard drive containing the partition with the
disk image become defective in that it fails mechanically and/or
electronically or is otherwise not functional, what then? The "disk image"
residing on a partition of that failed hard drive becomes unrecoverable as
well. As Malke has pointed out, that's why it's usually best for most users
to use another hard drive - internal or external - as the recipient of the
disk image.
I would strongly recommend you use an external hard drive as the recipient
of the clone - either a USB or Firewire or SATA (should your machine have
SATA capability) external hard drive. Using the Acronis program for example,
you could undertake a direct disk-to-disk cloning operation so that your
destination drive would contain a duplicate of your source disk.
Another option would be to use the Acronis program to create a "disk image"
or backup archive file of your working HDD and store that image on either
another internal HDD (rather than on a partition of the source drive as
noted above) or onto a USB or Firewire external HDD. Then use the Acronis
Recovery program to restore your system should that become necessary. This
"disk image" process was the one referred to by Liam & Malke in their
responses to you. As Malke mentioned you would create what Acronis refers to
as "Bootable Rescue Media", i.e. a bootable CD containing the basic Acronis
program, which could be used in the Recovery process.
What all this comes down to is simply this...
Using the Acronis program you basically have two kinds of backup/recovery
processes that you can choose from - either a direct disk-to-disk cloning
process or creating a disk image (what Acronis refers to as a "backup
archive") and storing that image on another HDD, internal or external.
(Actually, in theory, you can store the image on DVDs but for most users
that's not a practical option in my view). In either case, both processes
are reasonably simple & straightforward to undertake.
Anna
