Vista 64 Restore, ATI 2009 and MBR

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by Harry230, Dec 20, 2008.

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  1. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Paul:

    Harry said that he did use Vista to create partitions in his post #4.

    The Complete PC Backup and Restore dialogs are confusing and it would be easy to make a mistake. There is a nice illustrated tutorial that shows all of the dialogs for Backup here and for Restore here. Here is an example of how confusing the restore process is:
    I still don't know how to interpret this. By "all of the data on the disk" do they mean all of the data on the partition being restored, or literally all of the data on the disk? I'd have to conclude that "disk" has the Windows meaning; i.e. "partition".

    Good point about the partition offset. Since Vista will install to existing partitions with any arbitrary offset, Microsoft would have had to take that into consideration, one would hope. My best educated guess is that they just restore a copy of the old partition table if you check off the option, then do a quick format on all of the partitions followed by a restoration of the image. But without testing, this is only a guess.
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2008
  2. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    Thanks. I didn't go back and read the start of the thread again so I missed that.

    To me, it sounds more like the Acronis One-Click Restore option -- you'd better have everything you want in the image because that's all you'll get when you restore (everything else on the drive will be lost).

    If the drive was restored exactly as it was when you made the backup and the partitions were in exactly the same place and only a quick format was done, then you'd think that recovery would be easy. That's why I wondered if the restore moved any partition's sectors (from your Post #18, this doesn't appear to have happened). Or, maybe, the MFT is cleared (wiped) along with the restore.

    Vista probably does a "clean" on the drive prior to restoring. I haven't tested if that causes problems with recovery efforts or not.

    Obviously, the data (or most of it) is still on the drive so it seems there is no "data wipe" done during the restore.
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2008
  3. Harry230

    Harry230 Registered Member

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    Hello Mudcrab & K0lo,

    A belated Merry Xmas to you both.

    All the disk partitions have only ever been created with Vista, although I have restored the OS partition several times in the past with Vista Complete PC Restore as I have rolled back after testing software etc. Never a problem.

    In hindsight I have been aware of the option "Reformat and repartition" and quite wary of the outcome. I have always excluded all disks as I was only ever restoring the OS/Program partition on the active c: drive.

    In this case I think Mark is right and I have missed checking one of the drives for exclusion, so just a little peed off that this is programmed this way, seems a dangerous method to rely on the user to exlude disks from reformat and partitioning.

    Good news though, after trying 5 different recovery tools, GetDataBack is definately the best that I have found and I will purchase a copy, it handles directory reconstructions quite well, thank you Mark..

    I started using Vista Backup and Restore as have just built new pc a few months ago and migrated from xp to Vista Ultimate. Since doing that have found the file backup rather lacking as you can't choose files types for backup and you have to include complete partitions. Also I became aware rather rapidly that Vista Complete Image restore has a few limitations the main detractor for me being that the image restore can only be performed if the new computer has at least the same number of hard drives and each hard drive is at least as big as the original it replaced. It is very sensitive to hardware variations which is not really helpful when trouble strikes.

    As you know configurations change and one may indeed need an image transferred to a new computer, that is one of the reasons I was looking at ATI2009.

    So to date I have found ATI seems to do good image restores, and seems to have "safe" options. ATI though seems to have quite poor file backup and can't use VSS in Vista 64 bit, I assume it can in 32 bit.

    So I have also been looking at Paragon HDM 2009 as that has Image and file backup.

    At this stage I think I will use ATI2009 from the boot disk to back up images as that seems quite consistent with all increments available. I also think I will now use a file program called Backup4All for my file backups.

    I guess you both have found ATI ok using boot disk image backup and restore?? and I am aware from reading forums to uncheck the file exclusions (esp .bak) when backing up image.

    Your comments would be appreciated..


    Thanks again for your assistance and hope you are having a happy and safe holiday.

    Apologies for your time in what looks like my mistake but I think I have learnt a valuable lesson which may help others.

    regards,

    Harry...
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2008
  4. Tatou

    Tatou Registered Member

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    Thanks for summarising Harry.

    I followed this with interest :) I have learnt something new about Vista

    A lot of people here use Karen's Replicator for file backups and ATI for image backups only.
    See http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

    I use VistaPE for my ATI boot disk rather than the Linux based version made by ATI. I find it much faster

    Glad you managed to recover a lot of data. I had to do the same many years ago and I sweated for awhile I have to say.

    Happy New Year
     
  5. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Harry:

    ATI has their own proprietary method for creating images in a running Windows OS rather than using VSS. The method used is described in the reply from Acronis support in this thread. I believe that VSS is only used in the Enterprise versions of Acronis products.

    I use a combination of methods with TI. First, I never use the program to back up files; there are a number of issues that can happen with file-based restorations done in the Linux boot environment, and to be honest, I do not trust Linux to write correctly to an NTFS file system. For file-based backups I use Windows Explorer and SyncToy.

    I do trust TI to do a very credible job with imaging, which is its core competency. Here again I use a variety of methods. If you like automatic scheduling of backups then creating an image from the Windows version of ATI works well. For restoration the Linux-based Acronis recovery environment works well with my hardware, but as you can tell from reading the forum, not everyone is so lucky. Like Tatou says, I've found VistaPE to be the absolute best recovery environment, and I now use VistaPE almost exclusively for creating and restoring images. This is mainly a speed issue. Surrealistically, I always use the Windows version of ATI when backing up and restoring Linux partitions, again because of speed.

    Thank you for taking time to summarize your experience. I'm sure someone will find it very helpful. I'm glad you recovered your data successfully. Merry Christmas to you and to your family!
     
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