I simply want to clone (or backup) my Windows XP internal hard drive in rebootable form to my new My Book Essential external hd so that I can restore my system to a new computer hard drive when my current computer crashes. I want all my data to be currently updated. I am guessing that I need to use True Image WD Edition to clone my hard drive on one partition of My Book and then use SmartWare to do automatic updates on the 2nd partition of My Book. Then, when I need to restore to a new computer, I would reboot to Acronis to restore the clone and then restore from SmartWare to update all the data from the automatic backups.
Is this the best/easiest way to accomplish this?
If my new computer has a newer version of Windows on it, will that be deleted when I restore from the True Image clone disk?
I’ve spent hours searching forums for how to do what should be a very simple procedure and am thoroughly confused.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
After hours of searching forums I have come up with the following procedures to do this.
A couple of things that might be useful to know. The WD Acronis is old and based on TI 2009 so it may not have drivers to boot your new PC. There is a debate between cloning and imaging. See post 11 by Grover http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3355 You will probably get better info over on the Acronis forums.
Thanks for the link. The discussion of cloning versus full backup seems to conclude that the main difference between the two is that the clone includes the OS and loaded programs as well as data and that the full backup consists only of data files but not the programs. Is that correct? If so, the clone option would be what I need since I want the load programs backed up/cloned in order to restore onto a new computer.
The Image can includes the OS. I’ve reloaded mine from the image a few times. I believe to clone you need to connect both drives to one PC. They are good at answereing questions over at Acronis forums. The have a lot of very knowledgable people there. What I do is partition my HD with system and programs on one and data on the second. You can make separate images of each partition. Then you can restore the system without bothering the data. I never got involved with cloning.
