NO, Acronis will delete everything on the seagate as it reformats it. Wipes it clean, then installs clone. There's a way to save some files but you don't want to do that. You wud only save some files if you wanted acronis to only install files that have been changed over a previous clone, bookmarks may have changed, xcell spredsheet etc. The OS wud not have changed. Under disk utilities>add new hard disk for the seagate then do the clone.
Thanks Banjo. Great Help! It worked after I first added the new disk and Acronis reformatted it. Then I used the Disk Clone option. This is not made clear in the Acronis manual. It first has to clean the disk and then use it to make a clone. It cannot clean and make clone in one run. Thanks again.
I use the backup solutions at CMS Products. http://www.cmsproducts.com It creates a bootable copy on another HD. If your primary goes down, you reboot your pc and tell it to run from the backup drive. Doesn't get any faster.
I prefer using the Acronis image backup feature. An image backup contains the full disk image but is stored in a single file - I keep various dated versions of image backups (from multiple machines I backup) on a network storage device. You can restore an image to a blank drive fairly quickly however obviously it would not be as fast as popping in a previously cloned drive so if speed is your primary consideration then sticking with cloning is probably best. For me, I like to know that I can go back 1 month, 6 months or a year in case a file is ever accidentally deleted and I don't notice right away. The images are compressed so they take up less space than the original data, e.g. an image of a drive using 50GB of space might be 20-25GB. The other nice thing is that you can mount these image files as a virtual drive and then access individual files from the backup image so it makes it easy to recover individual files or directories if needed.
It's not one or the other. If you are cloning 2 drives within a PC... And your primary drive has ANY problem... You simply power down... Open the machine and swap SATA cables... Clone now becomes primary. You can do images to a NAS also... Or do almost anything with USB drives.