Need your advise: OT

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by sarutaro, Nov 8, 2007.

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  1. sarutaro

    sarutaro Registered Member

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    My desktops comupters are equipped with two physically separarted HD.
    So data and tib are stored on D-drive. That worked out very well.

    A few days ago, I ordered a Dell laptop with one (100 GB SATA) harddisk. I tried to figure out how to handle this hard disk. I am considering to backup ATI tib files to an external USB harddrive (Seagate FreeAgnet: PATA). I am wondering how restore would work from the external HD. What do you think?

    Secondly, I need your suggestion whether I should dirivide the 100 GB HD into two partitions (one for 35 GB C-partition and 65GB D-partition for data storage) or not. If I don't create two partitions, the backup tib size would be pretty big and creating tib would take forever. I need your advise. Sarutaro
     
  2. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    The restore should work fine from the external HD but you have to make sure that TI rescue CD works with it before you trust it.

    How to handle HDs is a matter of personal preference but if it were my machine I would:

    1. Buy a second HD and install it for backups. I like imaging to internal HDs since it is fast. I do copy some images to an external for extra backup security.

    2. Partiton the single HD. I would do this whether I had the second internal HD or not. When using an imaging program it makes (IMO) very good sense to separate data files from the OS/applications. It is nice being able to overwrite the C drive at anytime without worrying about losing data files.

    3. In the single HD case with 2 or more partitions, I would make my images to the data partition and then copy them to the external HD. This way you have a primary image to restore if you have a software problem and this restore will be very fast. You also have the image on the external should the whole drive go bad and require replacing which normally is a rare event.

    That's how I see it but like I said to a large extent it is a personal preference. You will notice that I am not making use of the Secure Zone or any other fancy stuff, just basic create image and copy it to an external. Whatever you do, test your recovery process! To do that completely unless you like gambling means a second HD to test with - and after testing you could put it in the machine as a second HD.
     
  3. sarutaro

    sarutaro Registered Member

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    Thanks Seekforever. I am relieved after reading your post. I thought that there wasn't any room for the second HD for laptops. That's why I posted this question. For desktops, I used to remove or replace HD easily. Is it easy to add second HD for laptops as for desktops? Sarutaro
     
  4. Bruce Mahnke

    Bruce Mahnke Registered Member

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    The Seagate FreeAgent drive is very nice. I have two of the 320 GB model. These are USB not PATA. True Image 10 and 11 recognizes these drives both in Windows and with booting from the Rescue Media CD. I have created .tib images directly to the FreeAgent drive and validated them but have not as yet done a recovery.

    Creating multiple partitions is really up to you in how you want to manage your data. Regarding the backup size I don’t think you need to be concerned. As an example, my internal drive C: is a 160 GB Seagate PATA drive configured as a single partition. There is 12.6 GB used. Creating an image with normal compression provides a .tib backup file of 8.7 GB. In my case I want the image to include everything on the C: drive.
     
  5. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    OOOOOPS! Sorry but I missed the laptop part of your question. Some do have space for a second HD but the majority don't. You'll have to check the specifications.

    Again, sorry I missed that.
     
  6. sarutaro

    sarutaro Registered Member

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    Mine is also 320 GB model. It is very fast. In the past, I did not pay attention to the compression ratio. I have been using the default setting for the compression. For desktop system (with C and D harddisks), the size of backup tib is average 8 GB for 21 GB-size of the C-main partition and it takes about 11-13 min. If the whole C-drive (100GB for laptop) is used for creating tib, it's backup tib size would be about 40GB under the normal compression. That is too big. I imagine that the backup would take about one hour or it may take longer because USB drive is a little slower than the use of internal harddisks for writing backup tib. That is not so efficient. I wonder how high the compression ratio could be raised without messing up tib. Am I missing here? Sarutaro
     
  7. Bruce Mahnke

    Bruce Mahnke Registered Member

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    Perhaps I wasn’t clear in expressing myself. The 100 GB capacity shouldn’t be a factor unless the drive is full. For example, if you have a single partition and are creating a full backup, and have perhaps 50 GB used on this single partition, and are using normal compression (the default) your resulting .tib file should be about 70% of the used space (not the 100 GB capacity) or 35 GB.

    Bruce
     
  8. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    If you use higher or lower than normal compression, expect the backup time to be signif longer, in the once case due to increased pressing overhead and in the other do tomore bytes to write.

    However, if you are backing up only or almost only pics and music files, which are already very compressed, then zero compression won't be bigger but will back up faster.

    I thin if you start up a wizard to do a single backup and click on the diff choices for cmpression, you get estimates which should give an idea of the relative diffs in times -- assuming you had ordinarly files and not just mp3s or jpegs.
     
  9. sarutaro

    sarutaro Registered Member

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    Thanks Bruce. Now, it's clear. I thought that backup of the full-C-harddisk would be better. 35GB backup would take 40-50 min. What do you think? Sarutaro
     
  10. Bruce Mahnke

    Bruce Mahnke Registered Member

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    I don’t see anything gained by backing up unused space. By the way, I just completed a recovery of my single partition C-drive using TI-11, build 8053 and it restored perfectly.

    There is something that I want to check. The Seagate FreeAgent USB drive appears to spin down after a period of time without use. My question then is will a scheduled task run when the drive is in this reduced state. It needs a bit of time to get up to speed. I plan to trial it.

    I believe you are correct with 35 GB in 40 - 50 minutes. Sounds good to me.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2007
  11. sarutaro

    sarutaro Registered Member

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    I don't do scheduled backup. I do regular full backup, once every two weeks.
    I found that full backup is a lot convenient because my D-disk has a plenty of room to store a dozen of tibs. Sarutaro
     
  12. Bruce Mahnke

    Bruce Mahnke Registered Member

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    I understand, that is my situation also. The PC is on 24/7 and no power management is used. Imaging to an internal D-drive is very helpful. When I mentioned scheduled task what I meant was that it is a regular full backup scheduled to run at a specific time of day. I selected a file name of 9999.tib and scheduled it to run at 4:30 AM daily. After the first backup file is created if you edit the task you will be told that the file already exists and asks if you want to over-write it. I let that happen. What this does is to create a fresh backup file every day that is in addition to any others that were manually created previously.
     
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