Cloning HD with Acronis True Image

And so as not to confuse you, cloned means you already have an identical image installed on another hard drive so that in the event there is a failure you can just power down, remove the crashed drive and install the other drive and power back up. You need to make sure to periodically update the image on that drive if you want your personal files like music, documents and pictures to still be there in the event there is a crash.

Personally, I like to use an external drive to back up disc images, which are exact copies of the drive "at that particular moment". I like to do one immediately following a clean install, another one after installing all the available driver and windows updates but prior to installing any third party software, another one after installing all my applications and then periodically do an incremental backup so it stays up to date. Make sure to name each backup something that will help you remember which type of backup it is as the default naming scheme in Acronis is a little confusing for the novice. Also, pay attention to the advanced settings in Acronis as you can change the compression ratio it uses to create the backups. More compression means smaller overall image size but it also means more chance for data corruption.

I like to use the "normal" compression ratio as it reduces the image size considerably but doesn't compress the data so much that it causes problems. I also like to set the performance slider to maximum so the backup completes much faster. These options are both available on the Performance tab in the disc backup options window which you can get to by clicking on disk and partition backup on the top left of the main window and looking at the lower left hand corner of the dialogue that comes up.

In this way you will always have the option of returning to the exact point in time you wish to. I would also make the installation media because if you have a serious enough problem that won't allow you to start an image restoration while IN Windows, you will need the disc to initiate it at boot time.