Acronis clone question

Outsourced Acronis support is very problematic...

Anyway, does anyone know if after you make a clone you can update it with changed information on your disk automatically or a new clone has to be made?

Thanks

 

Hi Bill. If I understand your question right... yes that is possible.

In Acronis you can have either-

A) Full back up of your HD made

OR

B) What they call "incremental" back up which consists only of changes you make from last back up.

So for example say you make a full clone image on Monday, Tue you make make new excel spread sheet change... you can save (just) that change either manually or automatically however often you specify.

Wed you make no change. If you have your auto update set to daily, since no change = no update.

Thur, you install new trading software or Windows security patch or whatever, then just that is updated at your next auto update.

Acronis works great but not the best documentation/help. Saved my bacon 3-4x. But there are lots of other options too. I have a HD just for back ups so I make full image copies and just overwrite old ones when I make a change to my rig that I think is important. The biggest thing is to name them in a way that you remember what changes you saved. Codes, syntax, dates etc.

HTH

 

i am guessing that each clone has to start from scratch.

if one just needs to back up his data (and not the applications, windows, etc) then acronis can do incremental backups

 

Thank you guys. It appears that incremental backups can be done only with images but not with clones. If I understand this correctly, images are compressed backups where clones are identical backups.

I need to find a better backup software. Compressed images often have problems and cannot validate. I need to find a simple backup software that will create an exact close and then save any changes on my hard disk on a backup at regular intervals.

Does anyone know of such a program?

 

check out:
http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/

 

moonriver is right; I too recommend Casper.

 

Hello all!

Thank you for your comments! My name is Yana, and I’m writing you on behalf of Acronis Customer Central.

Aok, thank you for your help and kind comments, we really appreciate it!

Intradaybill, clone process is actually a process of copying the entire drive information to another HDD. It cannot be automated and cloned drives cannot be updated, but this is a very good suggestion. Rest assured I’ve forwarded it to our Development team, and they will look into possibility of achieving it.

Images are actually backups: the exact copy of your drive (of the used space of your drive), they are not compressed and definitely can be validated, restored and updated (incremental backups register the changes made since the last backup, and later on you can consolidate the backups into one or choose one of the incremental backups and restore your drive to that particular date).

I assume from your feedback, you had some inconvenience with the backups, and we’d like to help you with it. We will entirely understand in case you decide to leave everything as it is, and switch to another product, but we would highly appreciate if you could contact us with the issue details directly (http://kb.acronis.com/content/8153) or via PM to any Forum Moderator (http://forum.acronis.com/).

P.S. It’s absolutely up to you to decide, and I’m not saying that Casper is not worth using (it’s a good solution), but from our end I can say that our products have more functions and more flexible in use.

Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!

Thank you!

 

I used both Acronis and Norton Ghost. I like Acronis for a fast clone of the hard drive, and I like Ghost for backup.

 

Thanks for joining the discussion.

I got a boxed version of Acronis Home 2011. It worked the first time for cloning a disk and for making backups. Now, it does not work for backups. I have not tried to clone again. It gives error messages like

"Failed to read data from the disk.
Failed to read from sector ..."

No information in the support section about these errors. Then I noticed that if you try to backup data plus documents from NTFS to a FAT32 flash drive, Acronis cannot do it, it does not recognize the drive, but if you uncheck Documents, it can do it (but then generates an error). All that appears very strange behavior to me. I getting frustrarted with the product. Maybe I am doing something wrong. Maybe some other program interferes with it. Well, life should be easier. If I have to spend 4 days trying to backup my drive and end up accomplishing nothing no wonder why our productivity in the West is so low.

 

To clarify, the above statement from Acronis means Acronis cannot automate or update a clone; Casper has been doing it with aplomb for years.

intradaybill, Casper is exactly what you are looking for. I've been using it a long time and it's the only program I can think of that I have never had a lick of an issue with. It creates a bootable clone and it automatically updates it quickly and efficiently as you like—they call it SmartClone. And it has thoughtfully written documentation that you will likely hardly need.