Using Acronis Imaging Software with XP advice required.`

[Al Dykes]

beamish:
You can use the ATI program to clone the 17 GB contents of your 120 GB
internal drive to your 40 GB Firewire external drive. The cloning process
will overwrite the present contents of the external drive so that the
external drive will contain the contents of your source disk including its
NTFS file system following the cloning operation.

With your external HD connected, simply double-click the Disk Clone icon on
the ATI opening screen and the Disk Clone Wizard will open. Choose the
Automatic option and proceed through the Wizard ensuring that your source
and destination disks are correctly selected. Choose the "Delete partitions
on the destination hard disk" option and finish up with the Wizard. Only a
few simple steps and the cloning process will proceed.

Bear in mind as I mentioned to Samantha that your external drive will *not*
be bootable, however, you can re:clone the contents of that drive back to
your internal HD should the need later arise for restoration purposes.
Anna

If your C internal disk dies you boot from the TI8 CD and recreate the
disk from the latest backup image. (after replacing the dead disk, of
course.)

TEST TEST TEST. Make sure the Acronis recovery CD can see and read
your USB device. That's why acronis lets you evaluate it before you
buy it.

 

[Sam]

Hi Anna,

I really appreciate your help, but now I'm slightly confused about one area.
Putting aside disc failure, can you tell me if it is possible to completely
restore my operating system that is on a separate partition eg. C partion
when I have a cloned C partition stored on another partition. This scenario
is with a single disc computer. The image is stored internally on a separate
partition eg. F partition. Only after reading through all the threads I've
seen it mentioned that Acronis does not copy all the "boot data" and I'm a
bit confused about this because I understood that I could completely restore
the operating system.

Thanks for your help.

Samantha

P.S. I thought I had the perfect backup system, but I am wondering if it is
possible to back up without the external hard drive, It seems the gentlemen
below sais I need to copy the entire disc before I can make a complete
reinstallation. Is there any way around this

 

[=?iso-8859-1?B?uyBtcnRlZSCr?=]

You can write the .tib file of "C" to another partition on the drive, then copy the files to DVD for storage.

I write the .tib file in CD size chunks (700 MB) then burn 6 of those to a DVD. It is quicker and easier than writing directly to DVD. I create a full image of "C" not incremental. I have restored an image of "C" to a new (RAW) HDD and it booted.

I would highly recommend a 2nd HDD.

--
Just my 2¢ worth,
Jeff
__________in response to__________

|
| | > Ok Sam.
| >
| > Let's say you have four partitions on one drive. (C:,D:,E:,F
| > F: contains the image of the entire drive.
|
| Thats pretty much how things are set up Rod.
|
|
| > If your operating system is on C: partition and had a problem you could
| > restore the c: partition and would have exactly the same sector to sector
| > C: partition you had when the image was made.
|
| Sounds good so far, thats what I had been led to understand that it creates
| a complete clone.
|
|
| One problem, like I mentioned before, is if your entire hard drive crashes
| you lost the
| > partition that contained the image.
|
| Thats true, but thats not what I am worried about nor asking about, because
| as you mentioned before
| a person should and can make "external backups" when required.
|
| Acronis however, will not guarantee> that it will boot because the MBR does
| not get replaced when only
| > restoring one partition.
|
| Now this is getting to an area I was not aware of. I understood that the
| "entire C partition" would get cloned
| thereby making an identical replication. Meaning that it should be able to
| be rebooted again as per normal, otherwise what is it actually copying or
| cloning.
|
|
| > The only way you can be guaranteed it will boot
| is to restore the entire drive.
|
| This is not what I had planned to do nor can do as I don't have an external
| drive! So now it seems from this new info that I can't
| do exactly what I had planned.
|
|
| I don't see anyway that can happen since the drive is wiped clean
| before the complete drive restore happens
| > and your image would be wiped out too.
|
| So you mean I can't restore the entire "disc image" from my partitioned
| drive when I only have one "main drive" as you mentioned above.
|
| > Bottom line is you need a second hard drive, either internal or external
| > to store the image on. I wouldn't do it any other way.
|
| Are you absolutely sure about this? Somewhere in this conversation lays some
| contradictions, or most likely its my lack of understanding,
| I specifically asked the live help at Acronis and they didn't mention this
| point. Then it seems this can't do what I require it to do unless I have two
| separate drives in my computer which I do not or an external drive which I
| do not. Is this correct?
|
| >
| > Here is what I do: I make a full backup image of my entire drive to a
| > second hard drive.
|
| Ok, so my understanding is correct at least of what your saying, but I do
| not have a second hard drive.
|
| > Then every so often I backup the information that has changed by doing an
| > "append" to the full backup.
|
| Yah, I have managed to figure that part out.
|
| That way it only adds what has changed
| > since I did the first full backup. The image is never recopied. The
| > changed information just gets added to the full backup as an additional
| > file. After a month or so I then do another full backup and keep at least
| > one other full backup in case there is a problem. I can tell you this
| > method works because I restored to a third hard drive and I had an exact
| > working copy of my original drive. I did the test twice over a couple
| > months.
| >
| > I know this sounds confusing when you try to read it but it really isn't.
| > The time you spend learning how to use TI and the time to make the backup
| > images will never equal what it will take to reinstall an operating system
| > and all of it's software. Not to mention what valuable files you might
| > lose forever.
|
| That really really helps alot, and its not at all difficult to understand.
| Basically the only confusing bit for me or the bit I do not understand
| is the fact that it does not "copy the boot thingy" that you mentioned on
| the C partiion. This is exactly what is the condratictory understanding, I
| understood
| that Anacronis copied everything, so why not the boot records?
|
| Thanks very much.
| >
| > Hope this helps.
|
|

 

[Anna]

Hi Anna,

I really appreciate your help, but now I'm slightly confused about one
area. Putting aside disc failure, can you tell me if it is possible to
completely restore my operating system that is on a separate partition eg.
C partion when I have a cloned C partition stored on another partition.
This scenario is with a single disc computer. The image is stored
internally on a separate partition eg. F partition. Only after reading
through all the threads I've seen it mentioned that Acronis does not copy
all the "boot data" and I'm a bit confused about this because I understood
that I could completely restore the operating system.

Thanks for your help.

Samantha

P.S. I thought I had the perfect backup system, but I am wondering if it
is possible to back up without the external hard drive, It seems the
gentlemen below sais I need to copy the entire disc before I can make a
complete reinstallation. Is there any way around this

Samantha:
In my view it is *not* desirable (in a backup system) to create disk images
on the same drive where your operating system resides. This simply does not
provide you with the degree of security you need for a viable backup system.
You need one of two things...
1. Another internal hard drive, and/or,
2. A USB or Firewire external hard drive.
(Better yet, are two removable hard drives, but we'll leave that for another
discussion...)

Using a disk imaging program such as Acronis True Image, you simply clone
the contents of your source disk, i.e., your day-to-day working HD to one or
another of the above. That's it. Nothing too terribly complicated. No need
to create "disk images" of this or that partition. You simply make a
disk-to-disk clone.

Please don't make this more complicated than it need be. There's no need to
be concerned about copying "boot data" or partitions. Your ultimate
objective is to create a cloned copy of your working drive so that you can
easily restore the system in the event of a mechanical/electronic failure of
the drive containing your OS or system corruption of that OS. And for that
you use a disk imaging program to simply clone the entire contents of your
working drive to another drive that will serve as the backup.
Anna

 

[=?iso-8859-1?B?uyBtcnRlZSCr?=]

Sam, the point is ALL of your stuff is on 1 drive, if that 1 drive fails you have nothing. Having an image of "C" to restore is fine but what about the information on "D, E and F".

I have 4 HDD in my system. Drive 1 is the OS, drive 2 is documents, drive 3 is documents backup and drive 4 is for images of drive 1. In the past 2 weeks I have had 2 drives fail, both were purchased at the same time. One failed after 4 weeks and the other after 5 weeks of use.

See my earlier post for TrueImage info.

--
Just my 2¢ worth,
Jeff
__________in response to__________

|
| Hi Anna,
|
| I really appreciate your help, but now I'm slightly confused about one area.
| Putting aside disc failure, can you tell me if it is possible to completely
| restore my operating system that is on a separate partition eg. C partion
| when I have a cloned C partition stored on another partition. This scenario
| is with a single disc computer. The image is stored internally on a separate
| partition eg. F partition. Only after reading through all the threads I've
| seen it mentioned that Acronis does not copy all the "boot data" and I'm a
| bit confused about this because I understood that I could completely restore
| the operating system.
|
| Thanks for your help.
|
| Samantha
|
| P.S. I thought I had the perfect backup system, but I am wondering if it is
| possible to back up without the external hard drive, It seems the gentlemen
| below sais I need to copy the entire disc before I can make a complete
| reinstallation. Is there any way around this
|
|

 

[Richard Urban]

An image is like a high quality photograph of the source partition. It's a
good as it gets, as long as is was copied competently and does not get
corrupted after the fact. It IS the same!


--
Regards,

Richard Urban

If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Alpha]

Acronis however, will not guarantee> that it will boot because the MBR
does
not get replaced when only

If I understand you and you are correct, this is exceptionally alarming.
Are you saying that if I have a hard drive with 4 partitions, with the boot
partition C:, and I need to restore only the boot partition, that I cannot
from an image of the boot partition?

Or are you saying if the entire drive failed, and I bought a new drive and
*partitioned it exactly like the previous drive*, and I restored the boot C
partition, it would not work?

Can you explain further?

 

[Richard Urban]

Lets apply some common sense here, OK?

1. You should NOT keep an image you create on the same drive as the source
partition. If the drive fails you have lost everything.

2. You can not create an image of all partitions on a drive and keep it on
the same drive as the multiple sources. The image file would be ever
expanding, if it could copy itself, up until you ran out of room on the
partition where you were storing the image.

This is because the partition you are actively copying is constantly growing
in size, necessitating a larger resulting image file, which increases the
size of the partition which you are copying - etc. etc. etc. to infinity!
The image would fail over, probably without notification. I have not tried
this, nor am I likely to.

3. Even if you could accomplish #2 above, you could NOT restore said image
if you tried to restore all partitions. The partition containing the image
will be wiped out and you will be left with no image to restore from.

I have many times restored a 2nd or third partition without restoring the
first partition which contains the MBR. Why does this work? Because as long
as the MBR is not damaged in any way, what you are restoring in partition 2
is exactly the same, partition table wise (start sector and end sector), as
what was initially there. It WILL work!

Store your images on either external media (CD's, DVD's, USB2-Firewire drive
etc.) or on a second hard drive installed permanently in your computer.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Al Dykes]

Hi Anna,

I really appreciate your help, but now I'm slightly confused about one area.
Putting aside disc failure, can you tell me if it is possible to completely
restore my operating system that is on a separate partition eg. C partion
when I have a cloned C partition stored on another partition. This scenario
is with a single disc computer. The image is stored internally on a separate
partition eg. F partition. Only after reading through all the threads I've
seen it mentioned that Acronis does not copy all the "boot data" and I'm a
bit confused about this because I understood that I could completely restore
the operating system.

Thanks for your help.

Samantha

P.S. I thought I had the perfect backup system, but I am wondering if it is
possible to back up without the external hard drive, It seems the gentlemen
below sais I need to copy the entire disc before I can make a complete
reinstallation. Is there any way around this

You don't have a perfect backup system until you get copies of the
data that is important to you out of the house to another location
periodically. A two-disk system is fast and convenient but
it isn't a complete system.

 

[NoStop]

Anna wrote:

Samantha:
For what it's worth, let me give you my recommendations based upon the
experience I've had with various disk imaging programs, including Acronis
True Image...

1. For all practical purposes, a disk imaging program such as ATI can
"clone" the contents of one drive to another drive. So that the "cloned"
drive is, in effect, a bit-for-bit copy of the source drive.

Why do you prefer cloning the hard drive as opposed to making an image of
the hard drive? It seems to me that imaging would be better in that one can
then make incremental backups of the hard drive being imaged, with the
result that backups are faster AND one can choose how far back to go when
restoring an image.

Another advantage of doing a complete hard drive image is that if one needs
to install a larger hard drive to replace a broken one, the image can be
restored to the new drive and TI will automatically expand the new
partitions to accomodate the new larger hard drive.

Another advantage is one can designate the size of each image file, so that
they can then be burned to CD or DVD and offer even more protection by
taking the CD/DVD offsite.

And lastly the advantage of a drive image is that it can be done over a LAN
to another computer.

 

[Anna]

Why do you prefer cloning the hard drive as opposed to making an image of
the hard drive? It seems to me that imaging would be better in that one
can
then make incremental backups of the hard drive being imaged, with the
result that backups are faster AND one can choose how far back to go when
restoring an image.

Another advantage of doing a complete hard drive image is that if one
needs
to install a larger hard drive to replace a broken one, the image can be
restored to the new drive and TI will automatically expand the new
partitions to accomodate the new larger hard drive.

Another advantage is one can designate the size of each image file, so
that
they can then be burned to CD or DVD and offer even more protection by
taking the CD/DVD offsite.

And lastly the advantage of a drive image is that it can be done over a
LAN
to another computer.

My reasons for preferring a direct disk-to-disk clone of one's working hard
drive is basically two-fold...
1. It's a simple process.
2. It's effective.

The cloning process is relatively quick. Using Acronis True Image as an
example, I've found data transfer speed to be in the order of 1.5 GB per
minute using a medium-power processor and modern internal hard drives.
(Cloning to a external HD takes somewhat longer). Thus, for the average user
there's really little or no need to make incremental backups since it's a
simple, straightforward, and relatively quick process for a user to simply
clone the *entire* contents of his or her HD whenever he or she wants. This
can be twice a day, daily, once a week, twice, a week, etc. etc. The process
is simple and relatively quick.

Re your example of installing a new HD -- for restoration purposes the
contents of the cloned HD can simply be cloned to that new HD and the user
has once again a functioning system. There's no need for
partitioning/formatting the new HD nor installing an OS, nor installing any
programs. The clone takes care of that in one fell swoop. What can be more
direct or simpler or effective?

Should the user desire to create disk images on removable media such as
CD/DVDs, he or she is free to do so. But for the vast majority of users in
my opinion, there's simply no need to do so when a perfectly good clone of
one's working HD is at hand.

As to your final comment about the value of transmitting disk images over a
network, that could be a consideration for some users. But honestly -- what
percentage of users need that particular capability?

The bottom line to all this is that the overwhelming number of users need a
near-failsafe backup system. One that's simple to employ and effective in
its results. In my opinion using a disk imaging program such as Acronis True
Image or Symantec's Norton Ghost for disk-to-disk cloning is a near-ideal
backup system for most of these users.
Anna

 

[Rod Williams]

Lets apply some common sense here, OK?

1. You should NOT keep an image you create on the same drive as the source
partition. If the drive fails you have lost everything.

2. You can not create an image of all partitions on a drive and keep it on
the same drive as the multiple sources. The image file would be ever
expanding, if it could copy itself, up until you ran out of room on the
partition where you were storing the image.

This is because the partition you are actively copying is constantly growing
in size, necessitating a larger resulting image file, which increases the
size of the partition which you are copying - etc. etc. etc. to infinity!
The image would fail over, probably without notification. I have not tried
this, nor am I likely to.

3. Even if you could accomplish #2 above, you could NOT restore said image
if you tried to restore all partitions. The partition containing the image
will be wiped out and you will be left with no image to restore from.

I have many times restored a 2nd or third partition without restoring the
first partition which contains the MBR. Why does this work? Because as long
as the MBR is not damaged in any way, what you are restoring in partition 2
is exactly the same, partition table wise (start sector and end sector), as
what was initially there. It WILL work!

Store your images on either external media (CD's, DVD's, USB2-Firewire drive
etc.) or on a second hard drive installed permanently in your computer.

Are you responding to my post? Didn't I say what you are saying? Read it
again.

 

[Richard Urban]

If you follow the thread, this is under Sam's post!

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Stan Brown]

Lots of people have said lots of good things, but I think maybe
you're losing the big picture in the details.
`
In planning for backups you are really planning for recovery from
various levels of problems, from inconvenience to disaster. Roughly
speaking, you need to consider which "failure modes" you want to
protect against.

-- Backing up to a partition on the same drive is useless if the
drive dies. In 10 years I've lost three drives.

-- Backing up to another drive, one that's permanently installed on
the same computer, leaves you vulnerable if the computer is lost,
stolen, or destroyed -- and perhaps if it's hit with a power surge.

-- Backing up to an external medium or external drive avoids
problems unless your dwelling is destroyed e.g. by fire. (I assume
for an external drive you disconnect it and put it away except when
actually making a backup.)

-- Backing up to external media stored off site avoids even that
risk, assuming of course that you've tested the recovery method and
it works.

More variations are possible, of course. But, in general, the more
risks a method protects you against, the more work it is. For many
of us, that means it's likely to get done more often.

There's no one-answer-fits-all best practice. It depends on your own
personal assessment of risks against maintenance effort. Myself, I
know I "ought" to store backups off site but that would mean making
duplicate ones(*) and I just don't do it.


(*) Whatever else, never overwrite a backup medium unless you have
at least one more recent backup (preferably more than one. For me,
the number one risk a backup protects me against is updating a file
and then wishing I could revert to the earlier version. This happens
several times a month. Obviously an offsite backup is useless for
that, so for me an offsite backup means duplicate backups onsite.

 

[NoStop]

My reasons for preferring a direct disk-to-disk clone of one's working
hard drive is basically two-fold...
1. It's a simple process.

As is making a disk image.

2. It's effective.

Unless of course your latest and one and only backup is a backup of your
hard disk that contains some serious problems. I still think incremental
backups are more effective as it gives one more options in terms of what
one wants to restore.

The cloning process is relatively quick. Using Acronis True Image as an
example, I've found data transfer speed to be in the order of 1.5 GB per
minute using a medium-power processor and modern internal hard drives.

Not as quick as incremental backups after a full backup has taken place.

(Cloning to a external HD takes somewhat longer). Thus, for the average
user there's really little or no need to make incremental backups since
it's a simple, straightforward, and relatively quick process for a user to
simply clone the *entire* contents of his or her HD whenever he or she
wants. This can be twice a day, daily, once a week, twice, a week, etc.
etc. The process is simple and relatively quick.

And as I said, could leave one with a backup that one doesn't necessarily
want to have. For example, relying on your method could leave one with a
backup that contained a serius virus whereas using incremental backups
could give the user the option to possibly restore to a point previous to
the virus infection.

To each his own, but I felt it was necessary to tell the OP there are other
options when using TI and imho, a better option than the one you appear to
favour.

 

[Alpha]

I am excessively grateful for you response.

If I understand you and you are correct, this is exceptionally alarming.
Are you saying that if I have a hard drive with 4 partitions, with the
boot partition C:, and I need to restore only the boot partition, that I
cannot from an image of the boot partition?

Or are you saying if the entire drive failed, and I bought a new drive and
*partitioned it exactly like the previous drive*, and I restored the boot
C partition, it would not work?

Can you explain further?

 

[Lil' Dave]

Add another thing to all that's been replied to, to date. Never defragment
the partition containing the image information. Leave it alone.

Seek other newsgroups outside MS oriented news server types specializing in
storage for more in-depth information.

 

[Rock]

Add another thing to all that's been replied to, to date. Never defragment
the partition containing the image information. Leave it alone.

Why? Is this imaging program specific?

 

[éÇÏÒØ ìÅÊËÏ \(Igor Leyko\)]

I really appreciate your help, but now I'm slightly confused about one
area. Putting aside disc failure, can you tell me if it is possible to
completely restore my operating system that is on a separate partition eg.
C partion when I have a cloned C partition stored on another partition.
This scenario is with a single disc computer. The image is stored
internally on a separate partition eg. F partition. Only after reading
through all the threads I've seen it mentioned that Acronis does not copy
all the "boot data" and I'm a bit confused about this because I understood
that I could completely restore the operating system.

If your hard drive is not damaged you may restore a single partition without
any future boot problem because a MBR is on disk still.

 

[éÇÏÒØ ìÅÊËÏ \(Igor Leyko\)]

2. You can not create an image of all partitions on a drive and keep it on
the same drive as the multiple sources. The image file would be ever
expanding, if it could copy itself, up until you ran out of room on the
partition where you were storing the image.

This is because the partition you are actively copying is constantly
growing in size, necessitating a larger resulting image file, which
increases the size of the partition which you are copying - etc. etc. etc.
to infinity! The image would fail over, probably without notification. I
have not tried this, nor am I likely to.

Anyone can create a Acronis security zone on the single CD and save images
of all partitions in the zone without problems.
Restoring will be possible too.