Acronis clone to External Hard Drive?

I want to use acronis to clone my current hard drive partition and transfer it onto my external hard drive just in case anything ever goes wrong. that way I have a copy of a clean OS with all my programs. When going through the beginning process, the software says I'll need to remove my old hard drive when it's complete. Why is that and will I need to do so if I'm cloning to an external hard drive?

Is it even possible to clone to an external hard drive?

 

You won't need to remove the original drive. Yes, you can create an image to an external drive.

 

That message assumes that your objective is to clone the old HDD onto the a new one which you then put into your computer. Ignore the message if all you want to do is to make a backup.

Or maybe you are selecting the wrong option. If you only want to make a backup copy of a partition then you need to create an image which you can then restore back to that partition. This is different to making a complete bootable HDD.

If you haven't done so already, make a copy of the Acronis recovery CD.

John

 

Before You Make The Clone Make Sure To Defrag As Best You Can And Do A Scan/fix Disk To Take Care Of Errors

 

I want to make a copy of my HD that can be bootable. Thanks for the help.

 

That would be a clone. You clone your existing HDD to a new external (bigger) in a USB enclosure and then swap them out.

For example, I upgraded to a HDD that was double the size of the one that came with this laptop. The cloned drive transferred everything and doubled the size of the existing partitions.

 

Cloning a disk containing the currently active operating system will require a reboot. In that case, after clicking Proceed you will be asked to confirm the reboot. Canceling the reboot will cancel the entire procedure. After the clone process finishes you will be offered an option to shut down the computer by pressing any key. This enables you to change the position of master/slave jumpers and remove one of the hard drives.

Cloning a non-system disk or a disk containing an operating system, but one that is not currently active, will proceed without reboot. After you click Proceed, Acronis True Image Home will start cloning the old disk to the new disk, indicating the progress in a special window. You can stop this procedure by clicking Cancel. In that case, you will have to repartition and format the new disk or repeat the cloning procedure. After the cloning operation is complete, you will see the results message.

The manual transfer method enables you to resize partitions on the new disk. By default, the program resizes them proportionally.
In the next window, you will see rectangles indicating the source hard disk, including its partitions and unallocated space, as well as the new disk layout.
Along with the hard disk number, you will see disk capacity, label, partition, and file system information. Different partition types, including primary, logical, and unallocated space are marked with different colors.

To resize any partition, check the Proceed relayout box. If you are satisfied with the
partition layout shown, uncheck this box (if checked). Clicking Next, you will proceed to the cloning summary window.

Be careful! Clicking Back in this window will reset all size and location changes that you've selected, so you will have to specify them again.
First, select a partition to resize. It will be underlined in red.
Resize and relocate it on the next step.
You can do this by entering values to Unallocated space before, Partition size,
Unallocated space after fields, by dragging partition borders or the partition itself.
If the cursor turns into two vertical lines with left and right arrows, it is pointed at the
partition border and you can drag it to enlarge or reduce the partition’s size. If the cursor turns into four arrows, it is pointed at the partition, so you can move it to the left or right (if there's unallocated space near it).
Having provided the new location and size, click Next. You will be taken two steps back to the partition layout. You might have to perform some more resizing and relocation before you get the layout you need.