Other tools on recovery disk?

I am currently evaluating the demo version of Acronis True Image Home 9.0

My current thinking is to make complete backups of my C drive onto an external USB drive (using 2 disks alternately).

I have managed to make a "recovery cd" which seems to work OK

What I am wondering is this...

Suppose the reason for using my recovery disk is that my internal drive is hopelessly corrupted (or even had to be physically replaced with a drive which may have had some different partitioning or even different OS on it), how will I be able to do a restore?

Is it possible to put disk management tools (to create, format partitions etc) on the recovery disk?

 

When an image is restored, it overwrites anything that is currently on the destination disk. You do not have to worry about creating new partitions, formatting etc. nor the current state of the destination disk.
If you have to use another hard disk to restore the image to, then the only condition that you have to keep in mind is, that it's size needs to be equal to or larger than the original one.

When an image is created, it is also compressed, so you need not have to worry about having to use 2 hard disks alternatively. You will find that you can store quite a few images before you need to replace the disk.
You could practice by creating an image and then using the incremental procedure to add to it at the end of each day, week or month depending on how many changes you make to your computer and how often.

Use the second external disk for the time when you have created an image, and you want to test to see if you can restore it. Swap your internal hard disk with the external and then use the recovery CD to restore the image from your other external disk to it. If it works (sometimes it does not), then you are on your way to creating and restoring images.

 

Thanks Mark for you quick response.
Perhaps I misunderstand you, but are you saying that the restore operation will destroy any existing partition structure? Surely this would be disastrous if my internal disk were partitioned into say C and D, with valuable data on D and I was only wishing to restore C?

I have never been a fan of incremental backups. Partly because in the past I have experienced software problems. But mainly because of the risk of having so much invested in the continuing good health of a particular disk. If I do daily incremental backups for a month onto the same device, that device is exposed to the risk of being corrupted on many occasions.

As long as the time required does not become excessive, I prefer to have a "history" of backups on separate devices.

 

Hiawatha - ATI will only replace the partition u tell it to. if u just restore ur C: partition, ur D: is left alone

 

Indeed WSFuser, that has to be the only sensible way for things to work...provided of course that partitions C and D are still validly present and it is only the data inside them that is bad.

But what about the other situation, where the disk has been physically replaced? In the "old days" one would simply dig out a boot floppy with FDISK on it, but now many systems do not even have a floppy drive and I have doubts whether the old FDISK would cope with current sized drives and file systems.

I have not yet researched Acronis Disk Director, but could it be the solution to my (hypothetical) disaster? I presume Acronis Disk Director can provide a "recovery cd" that could be used to work on an unbootable hard drive. If so, it would be nice to be able to combine the two recovery CDs.

 

i cant confirm it, but id go with what mark3 said. if ur restoring to a different drive, then just make sure the partition is of equal or larger size.

if u want to format and/or partition hard disks, then yes, Acronis Disk Director would fit ur needs.

 

Slight correction. When restoring an image to a different target drive it can in fact be any size provided it is big enough to take the original HDD's used space.
I know this works because I have done it when testing and I have just downsized my C drive from 80 GB to 60 GB with no problems at all.

Xpilot.

 

If you want to partition a new disk, boot up your XP installation disk and let it go to the part where it asks about partitioning and formatting and you can do the partitioning there for your new disk. You can just do the "C" partition if you wish and then do the remaining space, if any, with XP's Disk Management tools later.

Hmm, perhaps you can do the entire operation in Disk Management if the drive is installed as a second drive without booting the XP install CD. The Disk Management tools won't re-partition a drive that has data on it without deleting the data - this is where other partition programs are a benefit.

 

Thanks for the correction. I have never restored to a smaller disk so it was rather presumptious of me to think that it would not restore to a smaller disk. It appears that it will, provided that it conforms to your specified conditions.

 

If you install the latest builds of both True Image 9.0 and Disk Director Suite 10 (as at April 24th - Build 3567 and Build 2117 respectively) then the Rescue Media Creator of either applications allows you to create a single, combined, bootable rescue CD.

Regards

 

Not to be pedantic on this, but just for clarity, Disk Director 10 is currently v. 2117, at least on my page.

Terry

 

Hi Terry,

Many thanks, you're absolutely right . I downloaded DDS 10 Build 2115 on April 14th and now find Build 2117 was released on the 18th!! .

I've edited my Post accordingly.

Regards