frybluff

I have several SATA HD's for my desktop which are in Pull out caddies from Maplin. I have one in and running all the time and it accts like a second slave drive. On it I update data daily with Freefilesynch. I have another caddy that I occasionally mount and after a scan for nasties I make a clone of the whole of the main drive (about once a month) Tis is kept for a doomsday scenario in a far part of the house unlikely to be reached by a fire! I also have a USB drive on which I make images about once a week, and a second copy of my data. This is also kept elsewhere. I use ATI for clones and images , and Freefilesynch for mirror copies of data. For a laptop I clone as above on a portable USB HD, and do images and data back ups as above on another USB HD.

I am pretty sure that the latest ATI does allow a Full Backup to be 'Restored' to ANY PC, not just the original from whence it came.

Scroll down to Universal Restore I think this may be what you are looking for.

Apologies if I am incorrect!

You may have trouble restoring to a totally different computer BUT you would certainly be able to access all of the contents of an Acronis Back Up file.

Have you not read the link in the response from Nontek?

Take your Acronis experience to the next level with our special Plus Pack add-on. This gives you advanced features, such as dynamic-disk support and Universal Restore, which lets you recover your entire system on a computer with a completely different architecture.

Isn't that exactly what you want?

Should have gone to Specsavers!!

But I hope my link above helps.

Cheers.