Cloning my machine with True Image 2013

Now that I have my machine in a pristine state with a brand new copy of Windows 7, drivers and all the updates, it’s time to make a copy of the damn thing so I don’t have to go through that again. We all know Windows will inevitably become a bloated mess so I need to be prepared.

To handle the task is True Image 2013, which uses a pretty impressive Linux Kernel. I used the hot swappable SATA port on the front of the Silverstone case I have to plug in a spare 250GB drive I have lying around. True Image sees this drive no problem so I cloned the 3TB partition to it and had the drive resize accordingly. That took about 20 minutes to make a full copy. With the pagefile and hibernation file moved to another location the backup is reasonably fast.

That was phase one. The next part was to make a backup to the SSD drive. It won’t stay there, it’s just the fastest drive in the system. That went quickly as well and made a 12GB TIB file. I rebooted the machine, removed the 250GB backup drive and let everything come up normally. That’s it, system cloned.

The final stage was to format a 32GB thumbdrive to NTFS and copy the TIB file over to it. I did it this way since the USB has much faster read times over write times. I can store this a lot more easily than a full size drive and it won’t wear out. True Image reads USB drives without problem so I can recover from this if I need to.

It worked surprisingly well and took about an hour to make two copies. The True Image boot disk only takes a couple of minutes to make and main app provides all the burning tools.

Now the big question, will it work to recover my machine?

Other articles of interest:

• It’s time to clone and backup my drives
• Acronis True Image 2012 for $19.95. That includes the Plus Pack and a Second Copy for Free
• O&O DiskImage Pro 8.5 on Sale for $14
• Over 10 TB and 600,000 files recovered
• Ashampoo Backup Pro 11 for $9.99 with Coupon Code
• Two drives restored, three to go
• SSD – Not for my OS, but for my frequently used programs
• Norton Utilities 16 – System Optimization Series
• The Binge and the Purge of the New Hard Drives
• How do you recover 10TB worth of data from damaged partitions?