Cannot restore JUST the differential file?

Why is it that when I am trying to restore a differential image, it will not let me just restore the differential image? It wants to restore the WHOLE image plus the differential...Am I missing something here?

My setup is backing up a 300gb hard drive. I do a full once a week on Friday and a Differential Monday-Thursday or the same drive (based on the full backup).

Now I have restore this drive on Tuesday (in full!) and figured today I would like to go and apply last nights differential to it to update it as of last night. The differential files is about 6gb. But when I choose restore and select wednesday nights differential file...It leads me through like I am doing a completely new restore from scratch..with the only two options being to delete existing partitions and restore the data or to do individual files and folders.

Where is the option to where I can restore just my differential data? Or is the only way I can restore a differential file is to restore the full backup too? That would not make any sense..

I do NOT want to do either of these. All I want to do is restore the differential information which was back up last night. From my experience in the past a 6 gb file does not take an extremely long time to restore (may an hour or so?) and I should be back in business...but I cannot get this to work

What am I doing wrong / missing in this whole process?

thank you for any help provided!

 

That how it works, the differential (or incremental) is based on, and requires the full image to make a restore

 

But that makes no sense whatsoever if thats how it works...what would the sense in creating a differential or incremental backup verses creating a full backup if you have to do a FULL restore ever time?? Is it only to save time in the backing up process? Because if so, I could care how long it takes to back up, but restore times are crucial and I don't understand why differential or incremental would be offered if you can not use them in the same manor as "real" backup programs use differential or incremental backups??

 

It is usually quicker to make a differential or incremental than it is to make a full image. However many users recommend that you only make full images, as if you have a number of differentials or incrementals there is more chance that one can become corrupted

 

When you are talking about image backups you are talking about in-use sectors and sector bit-map changes not files. TI cannot dump sectors onto a HD without knowing that they are going to the right locations and to do this it needs to establish the disk base-line which is the full backup.

If I had to make a choice, I would sooner have a fast backup and a slow restore. I make several times more backups than I ever restore.

 

If this is the case, how can I then go in to any one of those differential images and restore just a single file? If I can restore a single file, how can I not restore multiple i.e. all the files that change the previous night?


BTW thanks for the help so far...and if this is the case, why does Acronis not clearly state that you are unable to use the differential backups as you would use them in any other backup program>

 

You can't mount only the differential file, all of the archive has to be present. TI automatically mounts the full associated with the differential. To be clear, my discussion is about images since that is what you mentioned in your first post. I don't know how TI handles Files and Folders backups it does use the filesystem which is why it is so much slower.

 

hmmm.....well, I may have been thinking of using acronis in the wrong way then. I was hoping to create weekly full images and daily differentials, planning on restoring th full image once a week to a backup PC....and then in the even of an emergency...restore the differential data (in what I was hoping would be a much quicker time period) to the backup PC so that it could then be put in place of the machine that was having issues...

From the way I understood it from it's documentaion, I figured that this wasa plausible idea...but in fact...it looks like it will not be a good choice?

 

If you are restoring the OS to a different machine you are going to have issues because of the differences in hardware/drivers and Windows activation likely.

In your first post you talked about restoring a 6GB file in around an hour. If you have the archive on a HD you should be able to do it about roughly 6-8 minutes (without validate).

 

I'm not too worried with this because I am using universal restore to succesfully migrate it to a new machine...(the operating system drive) but the main drive I am concerned with is a data drive that is independent of the OS containing files and folders. The 6gb file is the size of the most recent differential image I have been working with.

I have been trying to restore these archives over a network...and to restore the 200GB of data (roughly a 140gb acronis compressed image) It has taken me approximately anywhere from 5-7+ hours using the network or a USB drive. Ar you suggesting restoring it to another drive in the same machine for added speed?

 

Internal drive to internal drive is fastest. My primary backup is to a second internal HD. I only copy over the network or to USB selected backups for secondary security. I then will copy the occasional selected backup to DVD for third level security.

Here are some numbers from a 2.8Ghz P4, 1 GB memory, 2 SATA1 internal drives with 100Mbps wired network. I don't have every case but you get the idea. Incidently a Gigabit network is only around 2-3 times faster than the 100Mbps network. Windows is always faster than the Linux environment.

The numbers are all done by dividing the compressed tib file size by the time.

Create TI archive to remote PC over 100Mbps network under Win XP: 326MB/min to create normally compressed archive.

Create TI archive to second internal HD under Win XP: 1408 MB/min.

Restore an archive from second internal HD using TI Linux recovery environment: 963 MB/min

Create an archive over 100Mbps network using TI Linux recovery environment: 221 MB/min (poorer drivers, etc)

 

Thanks for the input...I was thinking about moving the backup drive into the machine with the images using a "hot swappable" hard drive bay...I may end up doing that after all and see what my experience is for restore times....

Thanks for your help...I guess I am partly disappointed that Acronis was not going to work the way I thought it would and am trying any way I can to try a nd still use it, but have reasonable restore times...

 

So just restore files, not the image.

 

I have tried restoring using the files and folders option and using the option of replacing only older files ...But after letting it run for about 2 hours and it saying it still had 7 left, I decided to cancel that...

 

Put a swappable drive-bay in each machine. Make your images as desired onto the second drive. When you need to plug the drive into the second machine and recover. That is about as fast as you can get with an image solution.

Faster way would be to only image the C drive at night. Use a program like Synback, ViceVersa, etc to maintain your data files. The assumes that you have a separate drive/logical drive for your data files which IMO is the only way to go. When you have a failure, plug in the drive and restore C to the active partition. Data files are already there.

Xpilot a poster on this forum uses imaging to swappable drives as his backup strategy. He then puts the freshly restored drive into service immediately which gives him confidence it is good. If for any reason it isn't, he still has the original. He has posted how he does it; search for his posts on the forum.

All of this begs the question, why is it so important you be up and running in an instant when you have the failure? PC HW failures do happen but are actually quite rare. If you are having frequent software corruptions then maybe more effort should be directed to solving that problem specifically.

 

Funny you should mention what you did seekforever...I just started messing with viceversa last night for this exact purpose. I am testing it out today and seeing how well it might work out. Then in the case of an issue, universal restoring the C: drive to the standby PC and booting it up...I am setup as you suggest with a separate system drive and data drive.

This scenario I am working for is for an emergency...we have no issue with hardware or software...but in the rare case that something does happen to where the current machine is unusable...they want to be able to have a replacement machine with files as up to date as possible (was planning on previous night) to put in place and have it running within as short an amount of time as possible. I am setup with swappable drives, but my main issue comes in with the amount of time it would take me to restore the data to a swapable drive and get back into operation.

We are in a situation where replicating servers is not feesible or practical...but in an emergency, server downtime would cause a large loss to the company. So, we have to have something.

I will also search out Xpilot's posts..

I am going to get something working one way or another!

Thanks again for your help so far...

Have you had experience with vicecersa or any of those other programs mentioned?

 

I just started using Syncback Free. My situation is strictly a home operation not a business. There was a little discussion about Syncback and Viceversa a week or so ago. I got the impression that Viceversa may have more features from the comment made at that time.

The reason I wanted to use something like Syncback was to make life simple if I ever needed a particular file. I was doing incrementals with BackupMyPC and it was never real obvious to me that it would be easy to ever find a particular file - fortunately I never had to go looking for one!

One weakness I think the copying to a different device/folder has is that if you work on a file, save it and then it gets copied to the backup location in the night. You start working on the file the next day and realize you had screwed up the file with your edits. You go to the backup location and the file there is the same as the screwed up one because it was copied over in the night and overwrote any previous copy. (I am amazed that MS OSs have never implemented file versions.) So for a historical backup trail of files this method is not as good as doing incrementals or full images as long as you keep the incrementals or images, of course.

Naturally, you can avoid the above by doing the common trick of doing a Save As with a different name so you don't overwrite the original in case you need it again.

Since you are doing this for business purposes, you might consider a second backup method as well. The grief you will have needing to take extra time to restore the data is nothing compared to the grief you will encounter if your one data backup method fails for some reason.

HDs are cheap these days and you might want to have several and perhaps use a different one each night for the backup. This would give you a short historical record of file changes and if the backup fails one night, you have the previous ones to fall back on. If you really want to go up a notch in security, you can have 2 weeks worth and move the previous weeks off-site in case the building burns down. Company I used to work for had a fire-proof vault on-site and off-site storage about 5 miles away.

Also, since it is for business, don't go, or let anybody convince you to go on the cheap for doing this task. It is very important and more than one business has gone under because they lost all their records. It will be your neck if it goes bad!