Help! Using Acronis True Image (ATI) to Clone to a File

Hunter, welcome to these public User Forums.

You can use ATI 2021 to make a Backup image of your laptop OS disk & all partitions, where the image can be stored in any accessible destination location, i.e. an external disk, network drive / NAS etc.

You can create Acronis Rescue Media from which you can boot the laptop and create an offline full disk image if that is preferred.

There is also an option that allows you to create an Acronis Survival Kit on a suitable external HDD where a small 2GB FAT32 partition is created at the start of the HDD to hold the bootable rescue media (WinPE based), and the remainder of the HDD can be used to store your backup disk image file(s).

See KB 65508: Acronis True Image 2021: how to create bootable media and KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

The option to create a Survival Kit is only offered when you are creating a new Disks & Partitions (or Entire PC) type backup task and are setting the Destination for the task to a suitable external USB drive that can be used for this purpose.
See KB 61639: Acronis True Image: how to create Acronis Survival Kit - for more information on the process.
Also KB 61738: Acronis True Image: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems
And Acronis Article:  The Acronis Survival Kit

KB 65539: Acronis True Image 2021: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

Recovering your disk image to different hardware is not normally an issue if the OS is Windows 10 as this OS handles differences in hardware far better than previous versions of Windows.

Activation of Windows is a different issue and would need to be handled aside from using ATI.

Hunter,

An alternative is to use Windows native tools to perform your task.  I am including a link below that discusses this procedure.  In the linked tech article the section titled Boot the IoT reference device and capture the Windows 10......  This will provide instruction for the task you outlined in you OP.

Image Capture & Deployment