How to create hard disk image with Acronis True Image

The story :

Our mini market division has a point of sales IBM server that is a few years old. After a client POS hard disk failed, we fear that the server may also fails soon. They were purchased together.

I decided to make an image of the hard disk just in case. I will use Acronis True Image Bootable CD to create the image into an external hard disk.

I am using an older version of Acronis, the later versions may look different. I bet the functions are likely the same.

Requirements :
a) Acronis True Image Bootable CD
b) USB external hard disk
c) Server with Bootable CDROM Drive

How I do it :

1. Plug the external hard disk (USB FreeAgent Drive) into the server
2. Turn on the server
3. Insert the Acronis CD before the Windows Server start
4. The server will boot using Acronis (picture below)

5. From the Acronis main window, choose Backup (picture below)

6. It will tell you that Acronis will use a wizard to assist you. Click Next (picture below)

7. Choose the hard disk partition you want to backup to an image and click Next (picture below)

8. Choose the target to create the image (I choose Free Agent external drive D:), type in the name of the image and click Next (picture below)

9. I will have 4 option to choose from. I may password protect the image, increase compression ratio, split the image or change other parameters  (picture below) .

10. I normally just click next to proceed to image creation (picture below) 

11. After clicking Next, the image creation process will start as indicated by the progress bar (picture below)

12. Wait for the process to complete and exit.

13. With the image created, I only backup the POS database into external hard disk daily. If the server hard disk fail, I will use the Acronis CD and image (in the external hard disk) to restore the image into a new hard disk. I will then copy the backed up database into the new server hard disk (overwrite the old database in the image).

You may find out or purchase Acronis True Image here. 

Kenneth's note :

• with Acronis, we can also backup the image direct to thumb driver, secondary hard disk and other partition.
• other software like Norton Ghost can do the job as well.
• there are free hard disk clone software such as Disk Clone but they are hard to use.