Backup of a disk drive using Acronis True Image

Published by JP Novak on February 1, 2022 and last updated on March 27, 2023

This page is part of a tutorial describing how I copied the content of a disk onto an other one using an Acronis True Image backup.

We saw In a previous page how I created an Acronis Rescue Media USB Flash drive. We are now going to see, step by step, how I created a backup of an existing disk using Acronis True Image.

1) Acronis True Image was still being executed on my computer, if not I would have had to start it up from a desktop shortcut or the Windows Programs Menu.

2) I selected the Backup Tools (the first icon on the top left) and clicked the “Add backup” button. I named the backup “Backup HDD 20220125” for the purpose of this tutorial.

3) I moved the mouse cursor over the “Entire PC” button and its label changed to “Change source”. I clicked this button in order to select the disk to backup:

4) I selected the “Disks and partitions” source as I wanted to backup the HDD with the operating system.

5) Then I selected the first HDD with the C: drive that had an installation of Windows 10 Pro and some programs as the backup source.

6) The next step was to select the destination disk where the backup would be saved.

7) Acronis True Image proposed three options for the backup destination. The first one, Acronis Cloud, was not available with my installation. The second option would use an external drive to save the backup (an external disk connected to a USB port for instance) and the third would allow me to select a custom location.

8) The selection of “Your external drive” tells you to plug an external drive with enough free space (estimated to be 93.2 GB in this example). The backup size will ultimately depends on the amount of programs, data and files stored on the source drive. The required free space was lower than the 155,5 GB of files stored in the C: drive and that meant that the backup would be compressed.

9) My computer had a second internal HDD with plenty of free space and I wanted to use this one instead of an external USB drive. An internal drive is usually faster than an external USB drive but not all computers have more than one. Please note that the backup destination cannot be located on the same drive you are going to backup if you want to backup the full drive. I clicked the “Browse” button in order to select the destination folder:

10) Then I clicked “This PC” in order to select the proper drive:

11) I selected the E: drive (the letter used by the second HDD on my computer), I created a new folder named “Backups_Acronis_True_image”, I selected it and I clicked “OK” in order to use it as the backup destination folder.

12) The next step displayed a summary with a description of the source and destination used by the backup process. There was an option to encrypt the backup file but didn’t use it for the purpose of this tutorial.  You should consider to encrypt the backup file if the source drive contains some confidential or private documents that should be protected. I clicked the “Back up now” button to start the backup process.

13) The backup process started to copy data and to estimate the remaining time:

14) The remaining time was estimated to be 55 minutes after having backed up 17GB, but the process ended being quicker and lasted a bit more than half an hour.

15) The backup size resulted to be smaller than the original estimation (84,3 GB instead of 93,2 GB). Acronis True Image can be used to schedule the backups, but it’s a feature that I didn’t use here as I only wanted to backup the source disk in order to restore it onto a SSD.

I now had a backup of my computer C: drive and I was now therefore ready to recover it onto a new drive. You can see how I did it in the next step of this tutorial using the Acronis Rescue Media created previously