Acronis True Image Home 2010

Hello I have been backing up my desktop to an external usb hard drive with this program weekly. When this is done, I safely remove the external drive and then backup my laptop to it. When I just plugged my external drive into the desktop, and looked at Acronis, it said, "You are not fully protected and should backup your system". I rebooted. I checked all cables at both ends and tried different usb ports. I then followed the direction to backup a second time today. Any idea why this notification appeared? It is safe to move from one pc to the other on the fly isn't it?

Hi, You can use an external hard drive to back up images from any number of machines. I have been using older versions of Acronis for many years and haven't receive the warning you mention…………however it could be that Acronis is expecting you to set up a secure zone (a hidden partition on your hard drive) to act as a repository for all your disc images. The advantage of this is that both the creation of the image and its restoration, (should this become necessary) will be considerably quicker via the internal SATA or PATA hard drive than it is compared with using a USB2 on your external drive. It might be wise (if you have the disc space) to use the secure Zone (hidden partition) that can be created by Acronis to take advantage of the speed, but you will also need to continue using your Ext. USB hard drive and making extra copies of your disc images there…………………….. hidden partitions on your main hard rive may be quick, but they no good to you if the hard drive fails taking out your data with it! Regards paws

Hi I was reading about the partition you refer to. I have an 80 GB hard drive. Maybe Acronis thought it was a new drive which needed backing up. I was surprised to see the warning because it never appeared before. This time I ran a backup which cleared the notice. I then deleted the backup just to see if the warning would be there with the backups I had in the first place. It did remove the warning but that is an awkward way of doing so. I'd like to think it won't happen again b/c I do not know how to rid the screen of it, simply. Do you have any suggestions there?