Acronis � and I presume you mean Acronis True Image is a very useful piece of back up software. It gives you many options including making a full backup up of your hard drive (including all settings, drivers, software, ect) on to either your internal drive, say your existing C drive, or another internal drive (if you have more than one), an external drive (say a usb drive) or external media (CD�s or DVD�s)
So what�s the point of backing up to your C drive you say? Well Acronis can create what it calls a secure zone on your C drive. Its really another partition on your drive and its hidden from Windows so it can�t be seen in Explorer. Say your PC becomes infected with a virus or drivers become corrupt, you can re-create your existing configuration using the backed up image in your hidden secure zone on your C drive. There are many ways Windows or installed software can become corrupt. Most crashes have nothing to do with the C drive itself so your secure zone remains safe.
Acronis also gives you many ways to access your back-up. You can click on the Acronis icon in windows and restore your PC from there. If you can�t get into Windows then you can press F12 when the PC is booting up and Acronis will load so you can get to your back-up. If your PC won�t even boot from your hard drive then you can insert an Acronis bootable CD or DVD (created earlier using Acronis) and boot from that. I know that if something goes wrong with my PC I can press F12 and restore it to exactly how it was when I made the back-up. The whole process takes about half an hour with no fuss or mesing around with finding software, discs, drivers and re-downloading updates.
There are many many more ways which Acronis can back up for you, too many in fact to list them all here. I keep one compressed backup on my C drive in the secure zone and one on an external USB hard drive. I do a full back-up every couple of weeks but you can just do incremental back-