When you use Acronis and clone or image the drive you can use that to get back to exactly what you had correct? OS, everything. Couple of questions, please. Say it's a bad HD and you have the image or clone on an external. You get a new HD, put it in the box. How do you put the image/clone on the new HD? Are you running off the external? Do you have configure the computer to boot off the external before hand, when you set up the external and Acronis, before anything bad happened I mean. Reason I ask is that it seems that if the HD goes bad you have no computer to get the clone/image. Just askin'.
When I clone the drive, it also clones the MBR. So, when my rig acts up and I can't fix it easily, I just pop out the offending drive, pop in the clone, boots right up, even in a dual boot situation. Of course, this requires that you have a spare HDD lying around. I have 3, one for each OS.
I like cloning because it only takes minutes, rather than hours, to make and restore. The trick is cloning regularly, I didn't this time. My reason for posting this is that I haven't cloned in a while, so the clone I have is from October. I didn't really wanna go back that far if I could help it. But I did and I am now running October's drive. I backed up a few things first. Now, once I'm sure this install is right, I'll clone it, and then I try to clone at least every two weeks.
I may start an incremental backup on my 1 TB drive.
