What exactly is an "image"

My goal in buying this product was to be able to completely replace my hard drive's contents when I get infected with some little trojan, file system glitch, whatever. I've found it's so much more time effective to just rebuild.

So if I have saved a good image from my computer when it's healthy, if I restore from that later, would that overwright the file system and any little trojan .dll's? I don't want/need to keep backing up or adding to that image. I'm very religious about backuping with ntbackup.

 

Yes - restoring an image firstly deletes the existing partition/drive and then restores the chosen image.

FWIW - I like to partition a drive into 3 parts:

partition 1 - contrains the operating system and programs
partition 2 - contains ALL data
partition 3 is empty.

Then I make a image of part 1 to part 3
and an image of part 2 to part 3.

Later images from part 3 can be transfered to USB drives, other parts of the network, burned to DVD .....

Should there be a need I can easily restore part 1 from the image in part 3 without destroying the data held in part 2. If disaster strikes part 1 and part 2 can be restored from images held elsewhere.

 

An image is a complete snapshot of your entire system disk or data disk that is stored in an unreadable file except through the program that made the image. The images created with acronis allow you to restore the entire system disk or data disk and go back to where everything was on the day you created the image. That's the whole point of using TI9. But it is possible that you already have a trojan and don't know it. Then when you image your system it backs up the trojan too. And like you illuded to, the incrementals could also pick up a little nasty in there somewhere. Hopefully you have a complete image that is not corrupted that is clean and can be restored. An image stored offline of your system is safer than online.

 

Hello mtroxel,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

In additional to all previous posters would like to describe how Acronis True Image 9.0 Home works. Acronis True Image Home creates a sector-by-sector snapshot of the disk, which includes the operating system, registry, drivers, software applications and data files, as well as system areas hidden from the user. This procedure is called “creating a disk image,” and the resulting backup archive is often called a disk/partition image.

Acronis True Image stores only those hard disk parts that contain data (for supported file systems). Further, it does not back up swap file information (win386.swp under Windows 98/Me and pagefile.sys under Windows NT/2000/XP) and hiberfil.sys (a file that keeps RAM contents when the computer goes into hibernation). This reduces image size and speeds up image creation and restoration.
The partition image includes all files and folders independent of their attributes (including hidden and system files), boot record, FAT (file allocation table) and root. The disk/partition image includes the zero track with master boot record (MBR).

Therefore, if you have created disk/partition backup and some virus infected you computer (even MBR) or the system fails you will be able to restore the system. For this you will need Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue Media (CD, a pack of floppies or a flash card) which you can create using Acronis True Image.You will just need to boot from the rescue media and restore the system.

When booted from the bootable media you are able to access any connected hard disks as well as a wide variety of IDE, SCSI, FireWire (IEEE-1394), USB (1.0, 1.1, 2.0) and PC card (PCMCIA) interfaces and devices, including CD-ROM, CD-R(RW), DVD, magneto-optical drives, network, Iomega Zip and Jaz. So you can store your image files there.

Please note that the final choice depend on what operating system you use. Acronis True Image 9.0 is compatible with Windows XP Home and Professional operating systems including Windows XP SP2. Other supported operating systems are Windows 2000 Professional, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Service Pack 6, Windows Me and Windows 98. Acronis True Image 9.1 Corporate Workstation supports the same operating system. The difference is that Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation provides you with some additional features that Acronis True Image 9.0 Home. It supports more hardware and has an ability to perform the remote backup. You may also have a look at this post about the difference between Acronis True Image 9.0 Home and Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation.

Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced server, Windows 2000 Server and Windows NT 4.0 Server are supported by server versions of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home: Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server and Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows.

There is also a Linux version of Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Linux available.

Please take a look at the version comparison page.

I would also recommend that you have a look at the FAQ section and find more information on how to use Acronis True Image in the respective User's Guide (for corporate products here)

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov