Quote from: Armando on April 26, 2007, 01:10 AM

What if... You house burns ? 

I'm using Backup4All to copy the really critical stuff (encrypted) via FTP to my account on Dreamhost, which runs my website. I wish I could back up more that way, but at 30 kb/s upload rate it's pretty slow going.

To overcome the "burning" factor, I always have at least 1 HD somewhere else.

Over Easter the MoBo on my PC died on me - was I glad of those back ups as I had to do a clean install with the new MoBo.
So the question is this - is there an easy way to re-install all your programs onto the formatted C drive? I naivley thought it was done from the clone, but it wouldn't work so either I was just wrong in that assumption or I was right, but not doing the process correctly.

There might be options to achieve what you tried to do, but the only two I know are provided by Acronis True Image ("universal restore"), and Symantec  (I wonder if anybody had experiences regarding Acronis' Universal Restore).

Anyway, apart from these solutions, I think it would be fairly complicated to use your previous Windows Images with a new MoBo (problems with finding and installing the appropriate drivers, hard disk controllers, etc.). But I'm curious about what the experts here would say...

I made the mistake of upgrading from Acronis TrueImage Home to the Workstation with Universal Restore precisely for this reason...If you are not using a server with multiple machines to administer centrally then the TrueImage Workstation edition offers nothing over and above the Home Ed. and is not worth the upgrade price - plus with the Workstation version you have to pay an annual fee to download updates.

I'm in the same boat - I took advantage of what appeared to be a great deal to upgrade and can't see that it was really worth it (NB I haven't had occasion to actually TRY Universal Restore, but Carol's comments mirror those posted liberally on the Acronis forum). I wish I'd saved the price of the upgrade from Home to Workstation and Universal Restore and applied it to upgrading to Home version 10 Especially as they keep contacting me to extend my subscription for a reasonable price (far less than the cost of an upgrade from Home 9 to 10) but NOTHING ever comes of it. I've had two phone calls with the promise of a sales rep contacting me via e-mail to confirm the quote ($17.95 US for Workstation w/o UR), I reply to the e-mail (which asks only for info about which Acronis products I want the quote for - WTF? didn't I just do that on the phone?) - and then a yawning black hole of nothing punctuated only by my intermittent e-mails back to the rep asking for an update and their promise to get right back to me, which never happens. We're talking about a timescale of months here, not days or even weeks. Months. I gave up playing that game after dealing with the second rep and have ignored the second phone call, though I did blast the poor fellow making the call. Didn't seem to light a fire under anyone in sales at Acronis, though...

The only good thing is that Universal Restore cost me nothing... but it appears that you get what you pay for in this case!