Quote:
Originally Posted by RB
Here's my experience with backup software.
I'll preface this with what I intend to use it for:
I make a complete identical copy of the HDD so that in the event of failure I can just swap out the drive to my most recent backup and continue business as usual.
This is the C drive I'm talking about, the one with Windows on it.
Years ago Acronis True Image would allow you to do this but a few years ago they changed their software and AFAIK you can't do this anymore with their new versions.
I wasn't aware of this and was under the false assumption that my C drive backups would work as I stated above, but that's not the case.
If you swap the HDDs over, Windows won't work and will give you errors.
D drives or data drives are fine, only the C drive (Windows) gives this error.
This is when I ditched Acronis altogether as I was sick of their upgrade policies and pricing and that I couldn't reliably duplicate (ghost) my C drive so that it would work when swapped out.
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Hi Andrew, that's odd?
you can certainly clone a boot drive with Acronis without any issues. I can't vouch for 2016 but any version up to 2015 will do this flawlessly. There is a big difference between making a file backup and a sector by sector backup. Every boot drive has hidden system folders as well as a master boot record and a disk signature that need to be transferred to the new hardware. If you do it correctly you can restore any boot drive to any other drive, even different capacity without the need to reactivate or reinstall windows. The only time you have to reinstall an OS is when your port it to a different motherboard or radically different hardware (graphic card or other) that may need new drivers or aren't even compatible with the OS or not supported. I've cloned countless boot drives, even virtualised them, mounted them as VMs on different hardware, etc... it all works fine. I'm still running two legacy XP machines with versions of Photoshop still working and registered that are years old. The host runs win7 on a totally different hardware. CD ROMs, printers, etc.... all work. The XP OS doesn't even know it's running on top of a different PC.