Safe or Full or Safe & Full rescue CD's?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by rc5115, Jul 7, 2007.

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  1. rc5115

    rc5115 Registered Member

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    Why is there 3 options to create rescue CD's, Safe or Full or Safe & Full?
    What does each of the 3 options do different from each other

    Thanks in advance for your reply

    regards...

    Roman
     
  2. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    As for the philosophy of the selections, Acronis will have to provide the answer. The differences are:

    Full - A memory-resident version of Linux. After it is booted the CD can be removed from the drive to permit CDs/DVDs containing the archive to be inserted if they are the required media. This version contains the drivers for USB, Firewire, network which is why it is called Full. Unfortunately, the Linux drivers available sometimes do not support some hardware very well or perhaps not at all.

    Safe - Nothing to do with Window's Safe Mode. This is a variant of DOS. Does not contain the USB, Firewire, network drivers. Generally, useless if archive is not on an internal HD but some newer motherboards will provide USB and perhaps other access via BIOS so external drives might be a possiblity. Regardless, the time to do a restore is very, very, very long.

    To sum it up, make sure Full boots and works on your machine. This is critical because this environment must run to do a restore of the Active partition (typically, C). Even if you start a Restore from within Windows, the PC will boot into this same Linux environment to do the restore.

    As is always said, the only way you know you have a workable backup/restore method for your PC, do a test restore to a spare HD and ensure it boots and is operational.
     
  3. rc5115

    rc5115 Registered Member

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    Hi Seek,

    Thanks for the reply. Have already experienced issues with driver support, attemped to write to an external USB hard drive, with no success.

    Do the same thing you do, backup an image to a DVD/R, and try and install to the same hard drive. One thing I do first is to erase the MBR and do a quick format on the hard drive, that way one knows for sure it the image restore from the DVD/R has been sucessful.

    regards...

    Roman
     
  4. DwnNdrty

    DwnNdrty Registered Member

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    Here's another "wrinkle" when it comes to Safe vs. Full.

    About a week ago I went to Restore an image - using a ver 9 build 3677 cd - that I made in November 06. Since the Image was on an internal drive and the destination was also internal I decided to use Safe mode for the Recovery. When I started the process, the time estimate was a little over 1 hour. After about 3 of the green bars appeared, the estimate was still over 1 hour. The Image was only about 10Gb and I knew that none of my Images took an hour to create, not even close. But I decided to let it run. After about 90% completion, the process threw up an error, "corrupted archive".

    With nothing to lose, I restarted the system and this time chose Full mode from the CD. Now the time estimate was about 10 minutes and the Recovery ended successfully. Go figger.
     
  5. rc5115

    rc5115 Registered Member

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    Hi Dwn,

    Talk about coincedence, the exact same thing happened to me yesterday, using build 4942 and TI 10. That is why I use the option to verify that the image file just created is valid and not corrupt.

    This lessens the chance greatly for any problems on a system restore.

    Norton Ghost had the same option to verify the image file, and that saved a lot of headaches.

    TI 10 also has an option to verify the image file you are backing up from before it writes to the hard drive. I use both after creating an image (takes about 25 minutes) and before restoring from an image (takes about 8 minutes). The file size is about 1.5 gigs, which easily fits on a DVD/R. This is based on erasing my hard drive, re-installing Windows XP Home, and all current critical updates (this process alone takes about 2 hours).

    regards...

    Roman
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2007
  6. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello rc5115,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    Please also see this article describing standalone (bootable) version of Acronis True Image in more details.

    Thank you.
    --
    Marat Setdikov
     
  7. rc5115

    rc5115 Registered Member

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    Marat,

    A pleasant surprise to receive an answer from Acronis tech support.

    Thanks...

    regards...

    Roman
     
  8. rc5115

    rc5115 Registered Member

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    Marat,

    Can you further explain why Acronis has chosen to use the Linux operating system and Linux drivers for getting access to all hardware devices. As you can read from TI users, there seems to be quite a bit of problems with Linux.

    Why isn't a Microsoft system used, one that would work with the.......Windows operating systems??

    regards....

    Roman
     
  9. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    There is a concept referred to as "licensing fees".
     
  10. rc5115

    rc5115 Registered Member

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    For sure, its always something to do with money.

    As many copies of TI that has been sold, would have rather paid a few more dollars for a less problematic software. When license fee are bought in large quantities, the cost per software copy is very minimal.

    regards...

    Roman
     
  11. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Probably not in this case. The BartPE approach puts a working version of Windows on a CD. To MS, that's a full version and very dangerous since you could make as many as you want. They probably don't want to license it at all, but if they did, they'd probably want several times as much as for an OEM version of Windows for the same volume. My guess is that if they could get a license, it would double or triple the cost of TI, and then the volume would drop.

    Let's hope Linux keeps getting better because that's what we will be getting.
     
  12. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Well, if most people had told me this, I'd have said that they did something wrong. Coming from you, I believe it, and it is very disturbing.

    The software ought to be able to recognize it's own data files and have a way to read them even under the hardest conditions since this is emergency recovery software.

    Very sad!
     
  13. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    I, for one, prefer having multiple options for backing up and restoring. TI offers the Full mode (Linux), the Safe mode (DOS based), BartPE (Windows XP based) and also backing up and restoring from a Running Windows System (XP or Vista) to a non-running system in a multi-boot computer.

    This gives me FOUR ways to make it work. If one doesn't the odds are in my favor that one of the others will.
     
  14. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    I agree absolutely that more ways are better. What is disturbing is the inability to read a good data file part of the time. Regardless of the operating system, the software should read a good data file successfully.

    The false Corrupt image and false Validated image messages and inability to restore a good image file are a real problem.

    Fortunately, I haven't had these problems, but they appear on this Forum daily.
     
  15. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    Yes, the software should work correctly in all modes. The problem is that there are three different versions of the program, each using different drivers to access the hardware. The fundamental program "procedures" are the same, but actual coding is probably different. I would guess they have a Linux coded version, a DOS based coded version and the Windows coded version. This means three "different" versions to program and debug to support the same hardware. It's no wonder differences creep into them.

    In the case of the data files (the actual image backup files), one would suppose that if ANY version can validate the image then it's good. The problem then lies with a "bug", driver or program access difference.

    For instance, you create the image in Windows and it validates okay. You then boot to the Full mode (Linux) from the cd and it fails to validate. Is the image bad? No, it can't be bad, it was validated okay in Windows. Can you restore it? Obviously not with the Full mode version. Does it validate with the Safe (Dos based) mode? And so it goes...

    The drivers and hardware also play an important part. In lots of cases an image will fail to restore or validate from one media (USB HD, DVD, etc.), but work perfectly when copied onto an internal hard drive. Or it may be the other way around. Is there anything wrong with the image file in this case? No. It must be okay otherwise it wouldn't work at all. It's just how the image is being accessed on the particular hardware that's causing the problem.
     
  16. Menorcaman

    Menorcaman Retired Moderator

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    Hi DwnNdrty,

    Can't offer a rational explanation for the "corrupt archive" message. However, I would say the lengthy time to restore is due to the fact that "Safe" mode recovery uses a combination of your motherboard's BIOS routines and a mini DOS to access the hardware. It's very likely that the hard disks were operating in basic Int13 mode rather than PIO or UDMA mode.

    Regards

    Menorcaman
     
  17. DwnNdrty

    DwnNdrty Registered Member

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    Is this something that a user can control or is it always Int13 when in "mini DOS"? Well, actually it is a moot point since I will always use Full mode now even with both Source and Destination being internal. I know that in Windows, if for some reason the drive drops into PIO mode that the system will be very slow.
     
  18. Menorcaman

    Menorcaman Retired Moderator

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    Hi again DwnNdrty,

    Oops! Got my knickers slightly in the twist there. :p In fact, Int13 has little to do with actual data transfer speed (it's a DOS interupt used to call the BIOS low level disk read/write routines) and I should, of course, have said "basic PIO mode rather than UDMA mode". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT13 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_input/output for detailed explanations. As you have found out, PIO mode has a much slower maximum data transfer rate than UDMA mode.

    Sorry for any confusion caused.

    Regards

    Menorcaman
     
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