[drawoh]

I was interested on backing up my entire pc (Windows XP), and I understand Acronis True Image creates an "exact copy" including all programs and tweaks. After reading Acronis's description of their product I still don't understand a few things. If my computer, which is 5 years old, one day can't be booted up, how can I get access to the Acronis drive image that's on my computer? They talk about making recovery disks, but if my computer is dead and won't boot up, how will a recovery disk help? Wouldn't you need a second computer to put into it the "exact copy" of the old dead computer, using a recovery disk? I don't get the concept. Help.

[Digidave]

If your computer will run but just won't boot into Windows, that recovery disc will work. I'm not a computer expert by any means so someone correct me if I'm wrong here. Go ahead & make the recovery disc, put it in your CD Drive & then reboot your computer. You'll see that it boots into the recovery disc before it gets to the Windows screen. Then you will be able to create a backup or recover from an archived backup. I've used TI 9.0 Home for a couple of years & fortunately haven't had any major disasters, but I did do a recovery this way once. I turned off Windows System Restore completely & just use True Image as a replacement. Works like a charm!!

[xgerryx]

Originally Posted by drawoh

They talk about making recovery disks, but if my computer is dead and won't boot up, how will a recovery disk help?

For a start your backup has to be made to another medium like an external hard drive. This becomes your main backup.
Say for example the hard drive on your five year old computer dies, you would be able to install a new hard drive and then use the recovery disk to restore from the backup you made to the external hard drive.

The recovery disk also allows you to use another computer to to access your backup and retrieve files should your old five year old suffer terminal damage.

[drawoh]

Thanks to both of you for your answers. One more question if I may. (Forgive my lack of terminology) What if my computer dies but I have the Acronis recovery disk on a CD? What do I need to purchase at a computer store to have something similar to what I have now? My computer is a Dell Dimension 2400, Intel Pentium 4, CPU 3.06 GHz, 512 MB of Ram. (I like the way it works and that's why I want to copy it through Acronis) I take my non-working computer to the store, and what do I need to buy to get the computer working again? A hard drive? Is that what dies after 5 or however many years? Do you just swap out the old hard drive for a new one, or are there other components that need to be swapped out after 5 or so years? And then, after swapping out what's needed, I bring home my computer from the store, put in the Acronis recovery disk, and my computer is just like it was before it died. Is that it? Thanks for any suggestions.

[laflaone]

I have Acronis TI 11, and I like it. What I did was buy a 2nd internal hard drive, which was bigger and better than my original.(they are suprisingly cheap) I used TI 11 to make a mirror image(clone) to the new HD. This copies everything to the new hard drive. I now use the new hd as my everyday hd, and the original as my backup. Be clear about the difference between mirror image and backup. A mirror image is as described above. It is not a backup, and you cannot do an incremental or differential backup to it. I, however, prefer it. What I do is once a month plug the power back in to my backup hd, boot up, run TI 11, and do a total mirror image. The only drawback is that anything that you have done in the imterim is lost if your computer crashes. The good thing is you don't have to worry about recovery disks, etc.

[DoubleHelix]

Any component of a computer can fail at any given time. There's no set shelf-life on the parts. Asking what would need to be fixed on a computer is like asking what would need to be fixed on a car. That depends on what's broken.

An image is a snapshot. Anything that changes after that snapshot is taken wouldn't be included. So whether or not a new or repaired system would be exactly the same depends on when the image was created.

[drawoh]

Thanks for everyone's input.

[Digidave]

Interestingly enough, I just discovered something today. I wanted a larger Harddrive to clone my original with the operating system on it. I went out & bought a new Maxtor 500GB. Along with it comes MaxBlast 5. Well, as it turns out this software is Acronis True Image 10. I thought it looked familiar, so I googled it & sure enough I found this.

Maxtor MaxBlast 5 & Seagate DiscWizard

You can download either of them for free! As long as you have at least 1 Maxtor or Seagate drive, it will work.

Excerp:

Seagate DiscWizard and Maxtor MaxBlast 5 are essentially same piece of software which is an OEM version of Acronis True Image 10 Home edition version 10.0.0.5077. The label of OEM edition means that it’s strip down version from full product of Acronis True Image with lesser functionalities and features. But this fact does not reduce reduce the usefulness and value of Seagate Disc Wizard and Maxtor MaxBlast, and can be used to complement the free Acronis True Image 8 Personal edition to provide disk cloning function from within Windows without having to use trick of Acronis True Image plugin for BartPE.

Exerp:

To use Seagate DiscWizard or Maxtor MaxBlast, your system MUST HAVE at least one Seagate Technology or Maxtor hard disk installed. Seagate Disc Wizard and Maxtor Max Blast supports Windows 2000 Professional SP4, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP Profession x64 Edition and Windows Vista. It supports file systems of FAT16/32, NTFS, Ext2/Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP.

Oh, by the way. It worked like a charm!!