Acronis Backup of System Drive using CD.

As you can see, this is my first post to this forum, I have however read and sometimes re-read many of the thread posts.

I purchased Acronis True Image Home 9.0 build 3677 and have burned my own Acronis True Image Bootable Media image (in ISO format) using the download link provided by Alexey of product support.

One of the forum members here suggested that backup and restore were less problematic using the boot CD and that idea sounds reasonable to me, so I booted from the CD and set about backing up my system disk to an external USB drive.

I selected full backup with the default settings and I assume this creates the backup with the 'active' option 'set'.

Before completing the backup I selected cancel because I wasn't sure what one of the operations in the que meant.

Right before starting the backup, Acronis lists the operations it will perform, and in my case it stated:

Operation 1: backup from disk 1 C: to Emy USB drive)

Then Acronis stated:

Operation 2: Creating Partition Image
Disk 1
Drive Letter C:
System NTFS
Volume Label
Size 139.7 GB

I'm not at all new to computers, or backup/restore operations, but this second operation raised the question in my mind as to what was being done to my C: drive, so I opted to cancel.

To members of the forum who have more experience with this software this may seem trivial, but I don't understand what Acronis is doing here with operation 2, and I didn't see it explained anywhere.

Does anyone on this forum know what this second operation does?

 

Nothing will happen to your C drive. Acronis is making the image of your partition with the drive letter C to your USB drive.

It's a good idea to select the entire drive rather than just the C partition for at least the first full backup. That ensures that the restored drive will be bootable even if you have replaced the drive due to a failure. Some manufacturers put additiional partitions on the hard drive for recovery or diagnostic purposes. You want one backup that has those partitions so that you can restore them if necessary.

After the one backup of all partitions that you save, you can just backup the C partition after that. If you restore to a new drive, you restore to old backup of all the partitions first and then restore the most recent image of C to bring the system up to date.

OK?

 

John,

Thank you for your reply and explanation, I will follow your advice.

With this second operation that you helped me understand, if the Acronis screen simply went ahead and didn't mention it, I most likely would have just done the backup.

But I believe that if Acronis is going to make a statement like 'creating a partition image' and then mention the C: drive, it should provide another sentence or two of explanation just as you just did.

Once again, thanks for your help.

A_Carina.

 

Hello A_Carina,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Please note that as jmk94903 said on the final step of the Backup Wizard you get the Window with the backup task summary. Up to this point, you can click Back to make changes in the created task. Clicking Proceed will launch the task execution.

The first part of the summary displayed the actions you choose to perform (disks or partitions to back, location for the image archive, compression level and all other options that you choose). The second and the third parts displayed the information about the disk/partition you choose to backup.

Please also note that you can validate the image archives using Validate Archive tool (Tool -> Validate Archive) of Acronis True Image to make sure that the image archive was created successfully.

We also recommend that you take a look at Acronis True Image 9.0 Home FAQ page, Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide and this article providing the illustrated instructions on Acronis True Image 9.0 Home installation and usage.

Thank you.
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Aleksandr Isakov