Acronis True Image Home is a fine utility and I can recommend it. It’s reasonably easy to use and it performs exactly as advertised. I’ve used it several times to upgrade to larger hard drives using True Image’s “Clone Hard Drive” function. You slap your destination hard drive into a USB enclosure, clone from your system hard drive to the USB hard drive, remove the old system hard drive, take the new hard drive out of the USB enclosure, install it into the system, and, Voila!, you have a brand new, upgraded bootable system drive with all of the data, programs, settings, etc. that were on your old system drive.
I subscribe to an online backup service that backs up my files, email, settings, etc. every night. Baked while you sleep. But once a month I like to make a complete cloned copy of my system using True Image. I alternate between two external USB drives. I’m always backed up and even complete system failure doesn’t worry me. I could do my full cloned backups more frequently but I’m not that patient.
I have identified one peculiarity of True Image and I don’t know enough about the details of the USB specification to identify whether it’s a hardware problem or a bug in True Image. True Image will fail silently, i.e. not produce an error message but not perform the cloning, either, if a USB webcam is plugged in.
Otherwise, I’ve found it to be handy and reliable.
My wife and I just ordered new laptops to replace our existing ones, which are about three years old. So we’re going from XP pro to Vista along with significant hardware upgrades. I know I’m not looking forward to reinstalling everything, but I don’t know of another option when upgrading to a new machine. Any ideas?
On notebook computers, especially, there’s little choice but to re-install any programs you need on the new machines. Copying your data—documents, spreadsheets, and so on—is a different matter. You can just copy the old stuff to the new machine over your network. If you don’t have a network, you can temporarily connect the old machine to the new machine with a cross-over cable plugged into the Ethernet port on each computer. Then with a little fiddling you can make the data on the old machine visible to the new machine and copy the files using Windows Explorer.
Thanks Dave. I do have a pretty good network with a network drive (along with a couple of external USB drives), so data isn’t a problem (I backup regularly too).
Well, I guess once every three years for reinstalling isn’t so bad.