Can TI9 backup open files?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by wjal, Aug 30, 2007.

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  1. wjal

    wjal Registered Member

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    I'm wondering about the effects of working while a scheduled backup is taking place. Does Acronis just copy the last saved version of an open file or how does that work?
     
  2. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    It's magic. As I understand it, TI locks the drive and all changes you make are stored separately from the area of the hard drive that TI is backing up. When the backup is finished, the changes are written to the drive.

    Personally, my backups are fast enough, and TI slows things down enough that I perfer to wait until the backup is complete.
     
  3. wjal

    wjal Registered Member

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    Thanks John, that's exactly what I wanted to know.
     
  4. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello wjal,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    Please notice that Acronis True Image uses snapshot technology which allows backing up of a hard drive in use. Here is a more detailed description:

    Once Acronis True Image initializes the backup process of a volume (which logically corresponds to a single partition, if there are no Dynamic Disks), Acronis Snapshot Manager flushes the file system mounted to that volume temporarily freezing all the operations on the system volume. Immediately thereafter, the Snapshot Manager driver creates a point-in-time view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume. Once the bitmap is created, the filter driver unfreezes the I/O operations on the system volume. It generally takes only several seconds to create a point-in-time view of the volume. After that, the operating system continues working as the imaging process is under way.

    Acronis True Image reads the sectors on the system volume according to the created bitmap. Once a sector is read, the appropriate bit in the bitmap is reset. In its turn, the Acronis driver continues working to hold the point-in-time view of the system volume. Whenever the driver sees a writing operation directed at the system volume, it checks whether these sectors are already backed-up, if they are not, the driver saves the data to the sectors that will be overwritten to a special buffer created by the software, then it allows the sectors to be overwritten. Acronis True Image backs up the sectors from the special buffer, so that all the sectors of the point-in-time view of the system volume will be backed up intact. Meanwhile, the operating system continues working and the user will not notice anything unusual in the operating system functionality.

    If we are talking about complex applications such as databases please read the following FAQ article:
    http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATIESWin/faq/backup-exchange-server/

    If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

    Thank you.
    --
    Marat Setdikov
     
  5. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Hi Marat,

    I was right. It is magic. :)

    Thanks for the more accurate description of the process. I had it backward in that it's the original data that's written to the special area and not the new data. So clever.
     
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