
This way, the backup software could be run on it at boot time, and the created drive image could be saved there as well (to a second partition, of course).
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Since I'd rather use one device for both booting and storage, I looked into how to make an external USB hard drives bootable. While this does work, network backups over wireless-G can be painfully slow.ĬDs and DVDs are susceptible to scratches, and a real pain to keep swapping out in order to back up gigabytes of data. My preferred method for backups is running automatically as a background process to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. The Acronis media disk lets you create a bootable USB flash drive or a CD image that you can use to burn a CD for booting your computer. This sure beats reloading Windows and all the applications and settings I have already invested the time into setting-up (at least one day, maybe two initially, and then countless moments spent tweaking from there). My favorite backup software is Acronis True Image, which I use to create periodic drive images so that in the event of a catastrophic drive failure, I can partition a new drive, restore the latest image, and be up and running in a couple of hours with little user interaction. With an external hard drive attached (USB), you can typically back up a complete disk image to this destination as long as the product you are using has drivers that support external USB drives.

If you've ever used disk cloning software such as Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, you know that you can usually boot your computer from the product CD for backup (except Ghost) and restore operations.

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