Backup to various places
Acronis True Image Home 2011 offers you flexibility in choosing destinations for your backups. You can save full, incremental and differential backup versions to different places including a network share, CD/DVD, USB stick, as well as any local internal or external hard drive.
You can save backup versions to different destinations by changing the backup destination when editing the settings of a selected backup. For example, after you save the initial full backup to an external USB hard drive, you can change the backup destination to a USB stick by editing the backup settings. The subsequent incremental or differential backups will be written to the USB stick.
You cannot use Acronis Secure Zone as one of the places for storing a part of backup versions belonging to the same backup “chain”, because such backup versions may be automatically deleted during automatic backup consolidation in Acronis Secure Zone. As a result, the backup chain will be corrupted. In addition, the feature does not work with FTP servers.
One more useful aspect of this feature is the ability to split backups “on-the-fly”. Suppose you perform a backup to a hard disk and in the middle of the backup process Acronis True Image Home 2011 finds out that the disk to which you are backing up, does not have sufficient free space for completing the backup. The program displays a message warning you that the disk is full.
To complete the backup, you may either try to free up some space on the disk and click Retry or select another storage device. To choose the latter option, click Browse… in the confirmation window. The Browse for Destination window appears.
The left pane shows the storage locations available on your computer. After you select a suitable location, assign a name for the file that will contain the remaining data being backed up. You can enter the name manually (for example, “tail_end.tib”) or use the file name generator (a button to the right of the line). Then click OK and Acronis True Image Home 2011 will complete the backup.
As was already mentioned, you can save full and incremental or differential backup versions to different destinations. For example, you can save the initial full backup to a local hard drive and then burn the subsequent incremental backup versions (or differential backup versions that are an even better choice) to DVDs. It is also possible to save such backup versions to a network share. If backup versions belonging to the same backup “chain” have been saved to various destinations, Acronis True Image Home 2011 may prompt you for the locations of previous backup versions during data recovery. This may occur when the selected backup version does not contain the files you want to recover (or contains only a part of them).