Support for long file names? No product does this?

Was wondering what imaging product does this ALL the way through the imaging process? Seems like all and I mean ALL the imaging software is really just DOS in a windows shell so the question begs how to determine BEFORE and image is created which files could become problematic in the name truncation that DOS imaging does? Is there a product you can get that tells you which files will be a problem and how to correct it? How does Acronis change file names? I think in ghost they get 001.gho or something like that so actually you only get 5 spaces for a file name.

 

If you mean for naming the backup files, TI will let you use a name longer than the 8.3 dos conventional way.

 

The only problem I have seen reported on this forum for TI and long filenames was for a very, very, long path being truncated. This path was within the XP file structure and had nothing to do with the naming of the archive file. I don't remember but I think it was even longer than the XP legal length.

When naming my archives I usually use something like CS070112_ and if the archive runs over my selected split size, TI will add 1, 2, 3 ... as required. So if I require 3 tib archive files they will be named CS070112_1.tib, CS070112_2.tib and CS070112_3.tib.

 

If you are talking about True Image 10, it runs under Windows 2000/XP/Vista only. There is no DOS in any of these operating systems. None whatsoever. There may be something that looks like DOS, but it's not DOS.

In any case, TI does not run in "DOS in a windows shell". Nor does Ghost for that matter.

TI completely supports any legal long file names.

 

I suppose I've just been reading the wrong posts about the battle between doing imaging backup under msdos versus windows hot mapping. From what I recall most windows apps drop down into ms dos to do the imaging and if they don't they set up a protected area in windows so as to freeze the live windows invironment enough to get an image. However I was led to believe it's all still msdos that is used in a windows shell interface to reinstall an image from an external USB harddrive or whatever. I was reading issues about need in to support USB 2.o drivers and where to get those blah blah blah and file renaming for dos 8.3. I'm thinking in my head that restriction would change possibly thousands of files. If windows based imaging doesn't have that restriction then why do people still think dos is best?

 

I don't know why anybody would think DOS is superior to just about anything but in this instance they are probably referring to the fact that the disk is not under the control of Windows. Windows is always doing something with the disk.

There are people who use TI who prefer to boot up the Rescue CD and make their images etc using the Linux environment. Again, not because Linux is wonderful but because the disk is now static. I personally always create under Windows and don't have any problems. Note that regardless of how the image is created, if it contains the active partition, typically C, then it cannot be restored from within Windows. In this case, Windows reboots into the Linux recovery environment.

This is what Acronis has posted among other info about the process:

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Here is a description of the unique Acronis Snapshot technology:

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/pr...in/faq.html#22

Thank you.

End Acronis info