Doreen has a mirror-image backup – now what?

Doreen has an image backup and now she needs it – what should she do?
Hi EB & TC. I am so glad I took your advice and made a mirror image of my computer. A few days ago my hard drive died – no warning. I got on to Dell tech who were very good but confirmed it was my hard drive and of course my warranty ran out a few weeks ago I Used Acronis 11 for my back up. I will have the new hard drive soon and my husband knows how to put the new one in, but I am not sure how to go about putting everything back. Do I have to reinstall windows XP first or should I use the Acronis Boot Disc.. The Dell Tech said they would help me reinstall windows XP Pro first but I think you said in one of your news letters Acronis backed up everything with a mirror image. I really do need your expert advice. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Whatever would we do without you?

Our answer
Thanks, Doreen. First of all, a true image backup is a clone of your other hard drive – sector by sector. It includes your Windows XP operating system and all your settings, programs, documents, files, photos, etc. It’s an exact clone of whatever was on your hard drive when the backup was created.

All you need make sure of is that the new hard drive is at least as big as the old hard drive that failed. If it is (and since it’s newer it almost certainly will be), then all you need to do is put the new hard drive in and format it to make it readable by Windows. Your new hard drive will come with a CD you can use to boot your computer and format the hard drive. We suggest you use NTFS and not FAT32 when you initially format – although either will work.

Once your hard drive is formatted, put your Acronis boot disk that you made when you first installed Acronis into the CD/DVD drive and shut your computer off using the power button. Then restart your computer by turning on the power switch and your computer will boot from the Acronis boot disk. You’ll have a menu on the screen and one of the options will be to “Restore your computer” (or something similar). Choose that option and follow the instructions. You’ll be asked which backup you wish to use. Assuming you have your backup stored on an external drive, browse to the most recent backup and select it. Acronis will start transferring the image backup to your new hard drive – sector by sector. In about 45 minutes to an hour, everything that was on your old hard drive will be on your new hard drive.

After all the files in the backup have been transferred to your new hard drive, Acronis will tell you that it has successfully restored all the files from your backup to the hard drive. And then you’ll need to reboot. Most backup programs allow you to reboot your computer from the book disk menu. Follow the step-by-step instructions Acronis gives you and reboot your computer – and prepare to be amazed.

When your computer has rebooted, everything that was on your old hard drive will be there and you’ll be up and running as if nothing ever happened. You’ll see why we always push image-based backups. No piecemeal, file-by-file backup will ever be complete enough. Image-based backups backup everything including your operating system. You won’t even have to enter your Windows license key. It’s almost magic 🙂