How to partitiion my WD20EARS SATA2 2TB drive and use Acronis True Image WD Edition

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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The Acronis True Image WD Edition Manual say under Disk cloning that it ‘does not provide for cloning a single partition. You can clone only an entire drive’.

I am confused by this statement.

My thoughts are to create a number of partitions on my new 2TB drive to do backups on each of my internal and external hard drives.  For example, I have my boot drive with 2 partitions, C: (Programs) and D: (Data), and internal drive E: (Backup Data), and another internal drive F: (DVD Data1) with the following size capacities:

C: (Programs)     103 GB

D: (Data)               196 GB

E: (Backup Data) 112 GB 

F: (DVD Data1)     280 GB

So, if I create 4 partitions on my 2TB drive, I will be able to backup up each of my hard drives.   Does this sound reasonable, or is there a better way to go about backing up my drives?

It would be nice to use Acronis True Image WD Edition to create a complete image of my C: (Programs) drive, so that, in the event of a C: drive failure, I will not have to re-install everything.  But the manual for Acronis True Image WD Edition says under Disk cloning that it ‘does not provide for cloning a single partition. You can clone only an entire drive’.   Does that mean that I would have to ‘clone’ both the C: and D: partitions of my boot drive together as one cloned operation?

wfeg

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  C: (Programs)     103 GB

  D: (Data)               196 GB

Use the “As Is” option in Acronis True Image WD Edition

Then, after that task completes, boot from your new 2TB,

and modify D: as needed, using the PartitionWizard freeware:

http://www.partitionwizard.com/

E: (Backup Data) 112 GB 

F: (DVD Data1)     280 GB

Then, format a third partition on your 2TB HDD, to backup E: ,

and format a fourth partition on your 2TB HDD, to backup F: .

Backups can be done very efficiently, and inexpensively,

using the XCOPY command inside Command Prompt e.g.:

XCOPY folder X:\folder /s/e/v/d

Where,

X: = target partition

X: can also be a Network Drive.

You can help from XCOPY as follows:

XCOPY /?

For example, we add the “/l” command line option

to see what changes WOULD HAVE occurred

if “/l” were not present in the command line.

This XCOPY task can also be executed from inside a .bat BATCH file.

Hope this helps.

MRFS