Backup confusion

I am a very old hand at backups, starting years ago with PC Tools Backup (remember that one? through various versions of Colorado and WinNT backup. So I understand full, incremental and differential backups very well. In the "old days" (including NT Backup in WinXP) my strategy was a full backup each week with differential every day, so I could restore with the full backup and the last differential.

Now I've started using True Image and it's got me confused. I did a full backup, then attached differential backups to it (like I did in WinNT Backup). But when I go to Recovery in TI, I can't readily see which is which. All seem to be the same size, all the same date and are distinguished only by volume 1, 2, 3 etc of "multivolume image archive". So if (heaven forbid) I have to recover "for real", what do I do?

Should I have created separate, renamed differential backups instead of attaching them to the "parent" full backup?

 

Are your partitions NTFS or FAT?

 

They are NTFS (and I just found out you have to have at least five characters in this forum's posts, which is why I've added all this!)

 

It sounds like your image was split...FAT32 is size limited to 4 GB, but NTFS isn't. What device did you back up to?

 

External USB connected NTFS hard drive (250GB).

 

What size are the volumes in the multi volume archive, and I assume you didn't tell TI to split them? You could mount the full backup image and look at it. I don't know if you can mount the differential or not, or if it mounts with the full automatically as long as all are stored in the same folder.

 

Yes, the differential can be mounted if the 'full' is with it in the same folder.

 

jongie,

When you want to restore from a set of images comprising a full and a number if incrementals, you just select any image from that set. It will be recognised as Volume X of a multivolume image archive and on the following screen you will be presented with a set o dates (representing the dates of each image creation) to select from in order to restore to the disk state corresponding to that date.

The program itself will take into account the necessary files to carry out the restoration to the date you selected.

 

Hello jongie,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

bVolk is absolutely correct. Independently of which volume (.tib file) of the multivolume image archive you select for restoration\validation, Acronis True Image recognizes them all as the entire image archive (all volumes should reside in the same folder) and suggests you several restore\validation points according to the dates when the initial full image and consequent incremental\differential images were created. The screen shots illustrating the issue are attached below.

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov