Restore confusion

hi guys, My question is about what happens to the rest of the disc after you restore. Assuming I have a full backup which consists of 25% my drive with data and the rest blank, now I want to restore my drive which is 70% full with my clean backup of 25%, does the remaining 75% of my drive get wiped clean or just left as is?

 

If your image was of an entire partition and you restore that image, the entire partition will be, in effect, be overwritten. Same holds true for an image of an entire Hard disk drive.

If your image was of files only, then only the files will be overwritten, I believe you can set an option to not overwrite newer files.

If you made a partition or disk image, you can mount the image (which treats the image file as a logical drive) and copy any data files you want from the image to another drive. System files that are open onthe target drive can't be copied this way because the OS won't allow the file on the target to be closed and overwritten.

Reference to the manual is strongly advised before proceeding.

sh

 

Thanks for clearing that up, yes my image was of the entire "C" drive.

 

Unused space on the drive/partition will not be wiped by TI when doing a restore. If there is any data on the unused part of the disk, it can still be accessed by a disk editor.

In your example, if your backup image contained 25GB of data and you restored that to the same drive that now contains 75GB of data, only the first 25GB of the partition will be overwritten. The remaining 50GB will be marked as "free" space, but will still have the same data stored on it that it had before the restore.

If TI wiped all the free space, restoring a 5GB image to an 80GB drive would take many, many times longer than it does since TI would have to write 80GB to the disk.

If you are concerned with security, it's best to wipe the drive prior to doing a restore.

 

Not so much a security question but a curiosity one. but thanks Mudcrab as that is exactly what I was wondering.

 

As has been described, restoring the image will leave the drive looking like it did when the image was created: 25% and the rest appearing blank.

If you want to save new data added since the backup image, make a new image (or file backup of the data) before restoring the 25% image. Restore the 25% image and then restore the data from the second image or file backup.

This will not work for programs you have installed since the 25% image or program updates, but it will allow saving and restoring data files. Programs and updates will have to be reinstalled.

 

Hello Paulcoy,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that during the restoration ALL the data stored on the target partition will be replaced by the image data, so be careful and watch for non-backed-up data that you might need.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Bottom line, apart from doing regular scheduled full backups, do make a full backup any day you make an important software or data addition to your HDD. You can actually do the backups while the computer remains active in processing other work.