Acronis True Image WD Edition, offered as Acronis True Image for Western Digital, is Windows backup and disk-cloning software for compatible WD storage owners. It saves files or system partitions for recovery and copies drives onto replacement disks.
A compatible WD storage product must be connected. Use with My Cloud requires the computer to be on the same local network. The backup and cloning tools produce different outputs: saved recovery archives or directly copied disks.
Backups and version history
Acronis True Image WD Edition offers two backup scopes with different recovery uses:
- Files and folders: Select particular documents, photographs or other local items without including their whole partition. The saved backup provides those items for later recovery.
- Disks and partitions: Select individual partitions or a complete physical disk, including Windows, applications, settings and stored files. This creates an image archive from which a partition or system disk can be restored.
Backup destinations include external drives, detected network storage devices and folders chosen through the destination browser. Disk images mainly use the TIBX archive format. The destination holds the archive used for subsequent recovery.
VHD and VHDX virtual disks can be included as files, but cannot supply a disk-level image. Files synchronized through services such as OneDrive or Google Drive must also contain their actual data locally. Online-only placeholders cannot provide their contents to a backup.
Backup scheduling
Daily, weekly and monthly schedules determine when a saved backup task runs. Event-based scheduling can start it when the same external destination drive is reconnected, at user logon or logoff, or during startup or shutdown.
Scheduling options can wake a sleeping computer or prevent sleep during a backup. Missed operations can run at startup. These controls apply to the saved backup task and its selected destination.
Backup versions and cleanup
Backup schemes determine how saved versions accumulate. A full backup contains the selected data. Incremental and differential versions record changes and depend on the full backup; other schemes determine how much recovery history is retained.
Single-version mode keeps a smaller history. Custom cleanup rules can limit backup-chain age, the number of recent chains or the space consumed. Acronis manages this history within the backup task and offers the remaining recovery points.
File and partition recovery
File recovery starts with an existing backup and a saved version selected by its time. Checkboxes identify the files or folders to retrieve. A search field supports names and wildcard patterns for locating items within the backup.
Recovered files can return to their original location or an alternative folder. This retrieves selected items without replacing an entire partition. The available contents come from the backup version chosen for recovery.
Disk and partition recovery
Image recovery selects whole disks or particular partitions from a saved backup. Each selected object is mapped to a destination. Its recovered data and file system replace that destination partition's contents, including the files already there.
Basic-disk partition properties can be adjusted during recovery. Source and destination disks must use the same logical sector size. Restoring the active Windows system disk restarts the computer into a separate boot agent to complete the operation.
Rescue media
Rescue Media Builder creates a bootable USB device, optical disc or other removable recovery medium. It runs Acronis outside Windows when the operating system cannot start. A previously saved backup supplies the data for restoration.
Drive cloning and partition layout
Clone Disk copies partitions directly from one physical disk to another. The result contains the transferred data on the destination disk. Unlike an image archive, this copy does not need a later restoration operation.
System replacement mode creates a bootable clone. Data-disk mode creates a nonbootable data copy. These choices distinguish a replacement Windows drive from a disk intended to hold the copied data without starting the operating system.
Automatic mode handles the transfer layout. Manual mode can preserve original partition sizes, distribute destination space proportionally or accept user-defined sizes and layout changes. Optional exclusions leave selected files out of the transfer.
Cloning requires matching logical sector sizes. Dynamic disks and multiboot systems are unsupported. A Windows clone on an external USB disk may not boot, and moving a system clone to different computer hardware can require additional drivers.
