TI Home 2009 Not Backing up Entire Drive

I just purchased TI Home 2009 yesterday and attempted to backup my entire C:/drive to a 1 tb WD MyBook. Although it took two hours(better that some I've read about) the C:/drive is on a new machine and only has 132G's on it. That includes about 18G's of digital photos. After a full backup I noticed only 88G's on the properties of the external drive rather than the 132G I expected since it should have cloned the entire drive. Any suggestions?

Dell XPS 2.67 Ghz Intel Core i7 920 Processor
6G Memory

 

In True Image terms, Clone and Backup are two different animals. I suspect what you did was a Backup which makes a compressed file of the drive. The file is usually about 60% to 80% of the used space on the drive.

 

I clicked on "Create and Image of the Entire Disk or Partition". Then, I chose the Full Backup method. There was no clone feature shown as in TI9 on my other computer that I saw.

 

Excellent. That's exactly what you should have done.

As DwnNdrty explained, the full disk backup image is of the USED portion of the disk, and the default is to compress at the Normal level. That makes an image about 60-80% the size of the used space. Your 88GB backup is 67% the size of the 132GB used space. That sounds about right.

OK?

 

That's not what I wanted. I didn't want anything compressed but just a 100% cloned copy of my hard drive that could finish in a reasonable amount of time...like an hour or so-that's what I purchased the software for. I finally found the Clone procedure in Tools and tried it but it looked like it was going to take till the end of the weekend to finish so I stopped it.

TI9 never took more than an hour to finish the cloning process but, it doesn't work with Vista and that's why I had to buy Home 2009, which doesn't work near as well as the older version for XP. when I cloned my HDD on the XP machine and the C:/drive was 75G, I got 75G on the cloned external drive. something wrong with this new software. It's not at all user friendly and I feel I've wasted my time and money.

 

OK, if you wanted to make a duplicate hard drive and not a backup of the drive, then you indeed want to clone the drive. If you have a 75 GB partition as the only partition on the drive, the clone will have only the 75 GB partition unless you changed the size while setting up the clone procedure.

The two hours to backup 132 MB of data is about typical for USB 2 drives.

I don't understand why you would want to clone your internal drive to a WD MyBook USB drive? That makes only one backup per MyBook, and there's no way to pull the drive out of the MyBook and put it in your computer without voiding the MyBook warranty.

The image backup you made could be restored to the same or a new hard drive to restore the system. You could store many backups on the 1TB My Book since each backup is less than 100GB. I would think that would be a better backup procedure.

 

The link below might be helpful. If you are expecting the Acornis backup to match the same number of bytes, it will not happen. The page file and hyberfil.sys file only include page holders. The closest you can come to a near match in bytes is to use the sector by sector option.

Clone or Restore using Resize comparison
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1299861&postcount=9

 

That was my original intentions. The reason I bought My book was to clone my hard drive and make two folders...one for a C-drive backup and another for Digital Photos. I didn't want to partition the drive. As I mentioned, in the drop down tab for "Tools", Cloning was indicated and I tried that but as it copies sector by sector as GroverH said, it seemed it was going to take at least 24 hours which I find ridiculous since TI9 would do that in under two hours with my older XP machine that had more Gigs than this new Vista machine has. I used a Firewire for the copying process since WD didn't include an eSATA cable in the box and I figured it would be faster than USB.

Perhaps I thought My Book was something it wasn't. From the advertising and from the Quick Start Guide, it indicated it could copy your entire original drive with just a "One button" process using the WD Anywhere Backup software included. Not so, as it wouldn't let me copy it. If it had and something went awry with the original drive I could put a new formatted drive inside the computer and use MyBook to copy all files to it essentially giving me the same drive as the original(cloned).Thats all I wanted to do. For all intents and purposes to me, cloned and backup are synonymous.

 

You really need to clarify in your own mind the difference between Clone and Backup in the way True Image uses them. You cannot clone a drive to a folder on another drive.

And, btw, version 9 (build 3677 or later) will handle Vista if you use the Rescue CD which has all the basic True Image features. It does in my tests with Vista.

 

I agree with DwnNdrty, if you don't get the TI meaning of the different mechanisms straight then you are likely to be in trouble when you really need the backup.

In TI parlance:
Clone means making a second disk that is identical to the first disk and it only works with whole disks, not partitions and certainly not folders. Because the second disk now must look like the first disk, only one clone can be present on the second disk.

An image contains all of the used sectors of the first disk, can be compressed, files can be excluded at your peril, incremental and differential backups are possible. More than one image can be stored on the media, space permitting. Is considered the best backup solution especially to restore a bootable volume. Apart from exclusions, the smallest unit an image handles is a partition.

A sector-by-sector image copies every sector in the partition, in-use or not, and this takes time and makes a large image. It seems to be most useful for backing up unsupported file systems, damaged file systems (so you can work on a copy), and it may possibly solve making image backups of encrypted partitions since TI doesn't have to understand the garbled file system. I believe this would be slower than a clone because I do not think that a clone wastes time duplicating sectors that are not in-use.

A data backup, used to be called Files and Folders, will backup files as data. Files and folders can be selected and backups can be compressed, incremental, differential. It will not restore a volume and make it bootable even though you have all the files backed up.

The WD Anywhere Backup appears to me that it is a Data backup as described above. I may be wrong but it doesn't look like it restores a bootable volume.

To do what you want to do with folders on the target USB drive:
Make an image of C in a folder on the target drive but exclude the Pictures Folders.
Make a data backup of the Pictures Folders and store them in the other folder on the target drive.

You've used TI before so you know the importance of confirming you can do a restore.

While I am preaching, my preference would be to partition the original disk and keep only the OS and Apps on C and put all my important data on a second partition. This makes it much simpler to handle and you can blow away C at anytime without worrying about losing data files. You can of course do whatever you wish.

 

If you read the WD message about their backup, it says it backs up all your DATA. It doesn't backup your Windows or programs. It wouldn't make a bootable disk if you restored that backup.

So, I think what you want to do is make two folders on the WD drive. Call one True Image Backups (or any name you like) and the other one Photos.

Use TI to make full partition/disk images to the True Image Backup folder. That will be a full backup that can be restored to a brand new drive and run Windows, your programs and have all your data up to that date.

Use the TI Data backup, the WD backup or just Windows copy to backup only your photos to the Photos folder on the WD drive. Since you want this separate, I assume the photos are you most important data and change fairly frequentsly, more frequently than you want to make full system backups.

 

This is most confusing. I simply wanted software, since WD obviously wouldn't do it, that would backup, clone, or whatever one would want to call it, my OS to include everything from emails to all Program files and everything in between. That's what the old software would do and if I wanted to clone again that external drive a month later, since x- amount of software and photo additions were added, it would overwrite that previous clone backup with the latest. I strayed away from partitioning as that puts you in a position of being locked in, so to speak, to a particular size per partition whereby with folders you wouldn't.

All in all, I probably would have been better served by getting an external HDD's(sans case) and clone the OS to it in the event of original HDD failure.I cold then just slip out the failed drive and put in the cloned version without missing a beat. Then, add a second internal drive as a slave to store the photos on to get them off C-drive since RAW digital photos can be quite large(about 16mb each). That's the way I did it with my old XP machine and I thought that's what I could do here. I'm going to have to study these great responses tomorrow as my mind has suddenly went to mush.

 

True Image is exactly the software that you want, but you seem fixated on cloning which isn't what you should be interested in.

An image backup is far better for your purposes. You can fit a bunch on your external drive. That's very important because it means you can have a backup made today, last week or several weeks ago, one made a month ago or two months ago and perhaps even an older one.

Why would you want to have multiple backups over several months? That's because sometimes you don't realize that you have a problem. A virus may be infecting your system or destroying files. A bad memory stick may be corrupting files slowly so that you haven't realized the problem. A hard drive may be failing slowly with some files missing or courrupted, but it still boots.

In those cases, a current backup is a backup of corrupted files, but an older backup (before the problem started) is perfect. You can restore the older backup to get Windows and all your programs running right and most of your data. From the newer but partly corrupted backups, you can extract as much data as possible that is newer than the backup you fully restored. The result is that you will have lost almost nothing.

With a clone which is a single backup, you could have lost so much that you would have have had to reinstall Windows from scratch and reinstall all your programs and reconfigure everything and then try to get as much data as possible from the corrupted clone. You would lose lots of data, and spend lots of time reinstalling everything.

I hope that helps explain why backup images are better than a single clone.

Cloning is fine for changing hard drives when you want to replace your hard drive with a larger or faster one. It's a not a good way to back a system up.

That's a pretty good idea. Some people like to have a second partition on their only hard drive for their data. Then they can back up each partition separately or together. A second drive is even better, especially if the original drive isn't large enough for two partitions with lots of room.

A second internal drive is also a good place to store backup image of the first drive and vice versa. There's little chance that both internal drives will fail at the same time. Although an external drive offers more protection, it is slower than an internal drive, so if you expect to make or restore backups frequently, you will save time with an internal drive.

 

Obviously I am not doing something right. I thought I would give WD's software another try and found that indeed it would allow you to add more files/folders that were on their "exclusion" list. I added Program Files/Program Files(x86) and Windows believing these to be important enough to back up. I even checked out C-drive to see how large those files were and together they were about 3.8G. I started at 12:40 this afternoon, had some lunch, watched Animal Planet awhile, took my dog to the park, came back and it was still running!! Here it is now nearly 6:30pm(EST) and it's still running. I aborted the whole process as after six hours and 18.8G's of space later, apparently something went amuck in the process. It should have copied those files in no more than a few hours at best and certainly should not have been 18.5G when I stopped it. I would periodically, during this marathon backup, notice it was even copying software(Nero6) I thought I had uninstalled and was copying MS updates as well.

Tomorrow I try once more with Acronis and will use the instructions so graciously laid out here by those who are much more adept than myself in doing this.

Basic reason for the desire to clone was just to have an entire backup of my OS in the event tomorrow or next week the original HDD failed. I needed only to pop it out and put in the backup and never miss a beat. I once tried Norton's Ghost and abandoned that idea all together as it was too complicated. I think I need to lay this aside for awhile as it's become most frustrating having spent hours this weekend in a vain attempt to backup files and folders. I'll need to re-read all this great info given as some of it seems a bit daunting. I'm not a newbie to computers but close to it when it comes to using this sort of software. As mentioned earlier, TI9 was different and not near as complicated.

 

Hi Colt

I think the other posters have got some good plans/suggestions.
I'll just mention that it sounds to me like the WD one button thing is probably not what you wanted. ( it will just do data and not the whole OS & data ).

 

Hi Colt,
I'm probably feeling alot like you tonight as I've been reading reviews and forums for hours now trying to find my best bet for disk imaging / cloning software, and my brain feels like jelly now. They all are scaring me.

I have two very dead, useless machines and one newly rebuilt with Vista and all the newest hardware including a new quad core and motherboard. Originally I had this system set up with the OS on a striped set and my D: drive on a single, third drive.
Upon losing the raid set up and now only using two hard drives, I realized I lost half the capacity I previously had with the old set up and I now, after 12 hours just to install my programs and such, I would like to throw one of those drives from my dead machines into an enclosure and bit for bit, byte for byte, however it goes, have an exact duplicate for safe keeping, just for swapping out in case of disaster, as well as eventually just throw a larger capacity one in the enclosure (when I can afford it) and do the same without installing all the drivers, software, etc. and be up and running without the days and hours of reinstalling.

I really could care less about incremental back ups of my files and folders, Vista does this well enough on a daily basis, and i do way too much hard core Adobe work and gaming to want backups running unless they are short and sweet (Vista's daily of my user folder). As long as I know I have an exact duplicate of the starting point with my drivers and programs, settings, etc...I'm a happy camper just to pull it out and throw it in the machine if the current one fails. I have another internal hard disk for my other back ups and those go on an external hard drive as well.

So, I guess my question to you guys replying here...
I think I'm looking for the same as Colt here, and I'm wondering how well this product does it. I know I want cloning in it's real meaning, also known as imaging or ghosting to many people.
Does Acronis do this kind of cloning, where I can install my OS, drivers and programs, and take that newly set up and pristine system drive and put it on an external drive (via an internal HD inside a sata enclosure, that utilizes USB 2.0 for transfer) so if need be down the road I can just take that drive from the enclosure and install it in my machine in place of the original C: drive?

Right now the intention is back up in the form of a cloned drive. Eventually I will be doing the same exact thing (cloning, in my HD enclosure) but to a larger drive to replace this 120 GB one I am now using and filling fast with programs alone. Does this product do that and has anyone actually utilized it with success or failure/problems?

Thanks, and hopefully any replies will help answer Colt's questions as well.