Oh I see
Yes I agree, if you were "cloning" then I would suggest both hard drives to be connected internally
For incremental backups and synchronous data backup Acronis True Image would be best

Well, i agree Acronis is the best for it.

I'm on the Acronis forums right now. Me and many others are having issues with the scheduling not working and backing up to an external HDD not working when a schedule is set. It just doesn't do anything if you backup to an external on a schedule, or if you add to an existing backup on the acronis secure zone itself on a schedule. Hopefully they can help me and others resolve this.

how do you re-install the clone image?

while on the topic:
if the main partiiton with the op system does die, how do you get the clone in place?

are y'all ghosting the image to another hard drive, then just plugging that hard drive into the machine, where the dead hard drive was?

or is there a routine on a backup external drive or backup burded dvd that runs itself?

with ghost you can created a bootable cd/dvd which can restore the backed up image to a new drive almost automatically - if that was what you mean
I believe other programs can do the same ....

I wasn't talking about partitions. Kimsland gave you lots of good clone software advice, as did Tedster. I see you went with Acronis. You should be able to clone the hd and then backup your data weekly if you so desire.

I guess I've lost the problem. If you want to copy the hd so that if you lose it, you can restore the OS, apps and data, clone is what you need. Acronis does this. If you only want to backup data, Acronis does this too.