Tell me about your preferred method of backing up your hard drive.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

I am trying to find a solution that completely clones the hard drive so that in the event of an operating system failure or hard drive failure, the (week old or whatever) backup drive can be plugged in and boot up.

I tried to do this using the Acronis program, but the backup hard drive I made doesn't boot successfully.

Anyone have preferred solutions that they use?

[hobbit709]

1. I've never had any problems with Acronis.

What kind of drive did you back it up to?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

2. It is a drive slightly bigger than my current one. Maybe I'll try it again.

[CK_John]

3. I use Acronis 9 and have had no problem on XP, ME, and 98. Also I use

an USB adapter so I don't have to open the box. Your problem may be with the pin setting on the cloned drive. I usual set the pin to slave on the backup.

Then I remove the USB for the system using the taskbar icon, at the Acronis prompt to reboot the system. Then I reset the pins on the clone to master and pop it in the box and remove the original and give it a test boot.

I usually do a backup monthly or before I do any major changes and do the changes with the cloned drive for quick return in case something fails.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

4. Okay, I'll play around with it some more and give feedback on this thread. Thanks.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. I have found...

That keeping the pin header on the "cable select" setting is the way to go with external drives.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

6. I'm a day late and a dollar short, but I'll weigh in and agree

I have my "workhorse" XP computer set up with Acronis Workstation 9, and I love it. When I get a computer to work on (virus cleanup, document backup, etc.) the very first thing I do is create a full backup archive of the client hard drive. This archive can be created with zero, normal, or maximum compression depending on how big your storage drive is. I don't usually compress it- I used to have compression issues when I used Norton Ghost (several times the archives turned out to be useless), and the best part about Acronis is you can go back into the program and mount the archive as a virtual hard drive with access to all the files! Plus, it can be mounted in either read only mode or read/write mode!

Another program I've been examining lately is Backup4all http://www.backup4all.com/

It's a far more complex program than Acronis, but it adds many configurable features to the mix. It reminds me somewhat of XP's native backup wizard.

One more I'll mention is Backup To DVD/CD by Willow Creek Software http://www.willowsoft.com/backup/index.html

With this one and a DVD burner you can burn custom backup archives directly to plastic.

I've used them all and I like them all. It boils down to how much you want to pay and what you ultimately want to do with it.

[Jersey Devil]

7. Guide to creating a bootable USB hard drive by Acronis

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/supportfiles/acronis_bootable_usb_hd.pdf