Acronis Image Saved to Desktop?

Installed Acronis 11 on Vaio FZ. Went great, no problems yet. Super program. It even copied my hidden restore partition to the back-up image. I made a Secure Zone on my C: drive. Question is, why did it put the full back-up image on my desktop and not in the C: drive as a separate folder? Should I leave it there or move it? Haven't bought an external HDD yet, but will. Is this normal, or did I miss something on the download?


Thanks,

Ken

 

I think it used your desktop because you told it to - would be the first thing in the browser box that comes up when you are asked to specify a location for the backup. If you want it to backup to the secure zone then you still have to specify it - did it ask you for a filename.

It isn't a recommended idea in here to create a secure zone if you are only using one hard drive. What do you mean you have a hidden restore partition, are you using Vista? If so, others can help further.

To be honest it seems odd it created an image of your C drive actually on your C drive

Are you using XP or Vista?

 

sparkymachine,

Thanks for the reply,


I do have Vista and probably installed the backup there by mistake. I created a 60GB SZ on C:. Per suggestions I will read up on it prior to using. I'm sure I'll have future questions. My hidden partition is part of Vista Recovery and only mentioned it since I saw someone post somewhere that TI11 can't read and backup hidden partitions. Where and how do I move it to SZ or another drive I would have create and partition. I may not be good enough to do a manual partition.


Thanks,

Ken

 

Ditto to Sparky. TI followed your instructions as to where it was told to put it. You must choose the desired location.

Open TI and use the program to delete the Secure Zone. Assign the space back to Drive C.

Read all about the Secure Zone before deciding whether to use and where to locate.

Suggested reading for info about the Secure Zone (SZ) is:
Xpilot is one who uses the SZ to his advantage. You can search his postings.

Security zone - where to create?
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1149756

I do suggest that you read about SZ features--which includes both advantages and disadvantages. The topic Secure Zone & Startup Recovery Manager can be found inside the "Useful Forum Threads" link within my signature.

 

your welcome,
I thought it sounded a Vista thing, I have XP and only know Vista from elsewhere. However, Vista or not you can't move anything from or to the SZ unless TI is backing up or restoring from it. I would delete the the backup you have in desktop unless there is already something in there you want. Leave the vista partition alone too.

You can remove the SZ using the TI manage secure zone option and it will reallocate the space back to your C drive when you go through the wizard.

I suspect you have not partitioned your C drive before then. You can do it using windows management but I will let someone else advise on that because I nearly lost all my data doing it once. So I used Accronis Disk Director to recover it and have used it since to manage partitions. Sorry but I don't trust Windows to do much but Vista might be better at it

 

Thanks GroverH,

Sounds like most of you don't use SZ or the Try and Decide Feature. I will get an external HD soon and do my future full backups to it and maybe certain files and folders. Main reason I got TI11 was to do full images only in case of my errors or internal HD failure. Never really wanted to use other features. May as I get more experience with program. I can delete SZ, but what do I do with the full backup on my desktop? Can I restore from there? I did read what you suggested and it sounded like you can't restore full image from SZ anyway. But in the User Guide sounds like you can. It sounds like it may be easier to leave it if I can recover from there, until I get the external HD. Any thoughts?


Thanks,

Ken

 

Sorry Sparky,

I was still typing while you snuck a post in.

Bottom line, can I recover from desktop for now?

Not sure I want to manually repartition my drive even with disk director, for reasons you stated.

Upon further reading it sounds like SZ was created to put your full backups there and recover from there, on a one disk system. Am I wrong?

I think once I get the external HD or USB, I won't need it.

Thanks Again,

Ken

 

Many don't use SZ, tis true.

I would delete it Ken because trying to restore from it will result in trying to overwrite itself - I'm quite amazed it worked as a backup in the first place so don't be dissapointed when I say I will not be attempting to replicate that

Yes you can restore a full image from an SZ but if it resides on the same drive i think problems arise.

I do have a second HD but rely more on DVD backups. An external drive is more convenient to use i suppose but limited in space again.

 

Hi Ken, you were answering while i was
I think I covered most things previously, but Disk Director is very good and easy to use and SZ may well have been what you say, I don't know.

 

Sparky,

I will delete the desktop backup, try to save one to the SZ for now. The SZ is 60GB and the total compressed backup is 29GB. If the desktop one won't restore then having one in the SZ that may not restore won't much matter. Still sounds like from my preliminary reading that is what the SZ is for on one disk systems. Will quickly get external HD or USB drive. Anyone of them better than the other? Am sure I will get better at this soon.

Thanks,

Ken

 

The one in SZ may well restore without any problem, i can't see a reason why not and I missed where you said you had done such a backup to SZ.

Choosing between external/internal - depends entirely on your requirements. Internal drives are much faster and easier to uitilise. I've never had an external drive and on my PC don't really see the need for one cos DVD backup is my alternative and thats fine.

Main thing is you have taken the correct steps so far

 

Sparky,

No I haven't done it yet. Will delete the desktop one first then backup a new one to the SZ. I'll see how that goes and post with any Q's.

Not sure about your current time, but I'm done for the night.


Thanks,

Ken

 

Is six in the morning here lol - my sleeping patterns are all over the place, it doesn't matter too much for me apart from if I need shopping.

Have some good sleep

 

Thanks Sparky,

I'll try what I posted above and let you guys know what happens.


Ken

 

Thanks for all the help Sparky and GroverH,


I successfully deleted the image on my desktop and saved a new image to SZ per User Guide instructions. All seems to be working fine. I have been reading a lot per your suggestions and am finding TI11 all I was hoping for. I am sure as I continue with my usage of and tinkering with TI, I will have more questions. One final question for now. Should I try a specific folder or file restore to verify operation, or am I OK as is? Did not validate, but read that is not really necessary.


Thanks Again,

Ken

 

Validating isn't absolutely necessary. In other threads here there have been discussions about it, so you could do a search and have a read. Basically the validation reads the backup file, does a checksum calculation every 256K and compares it to the checksum data in the backup. So it is a check to make sure the file can be read properly rather than comparing to the original data, which it wouldn't be able to do anyway since it might not exist anymore. You can validate a backup at any time and its really up to you. I haven't had a backup fail a validation yet but I tend to validate DVD backups just for peace of mind - I don't really care how long it takes.

To do a small test restore you could select a folder somewhere and move it to a temporary location. Then do a restore and select just that folder to restore and see if it works. If it does then its likely any other restore would work just fine too.

 

Thanks Sparky,

I came to the same conclusion on reading about validations, thanks for the confirmation. What do you mean by taking a folder and putting it to a temp location? Are you talking about an existing one on my hard drive? Should I copy that folder to the temp location and leave the original one intact, then copy the same folder from the image in SZ to that temp location. I have copies of personal data and some folders on a thumb drive, I could copy one of them from the SZ to its orignal location on the C: drive and use the thumb drive copy to reinstate if something went wrong. Or, just restore a folder to a different location on C: and delete if it went OK. When I restore from the SZ does that info stay in the SZ for future restores or is it deleted? Does anyone do this or if they can open files in image it is assumed the backup is OK. And yes, I have only one hard drive now, internal on my laptop. Am researching the best external HDD to use with a laptop.

One note, I still have my recovery CD's and I make monthly backups using my laptops backup feature and do thumbdrive backups of personal data. Plenty of places to retrieve from if an error occurs.

Sorry for all the Questions at once

Thanks,

Ken

 

Thats ok, I'll answer in a seemingly random order lol.

I, for instance, have a folder in 'My Documents' called 'Excel' which surprising enough contains spreadsheets and it has subfolders too. I could create a folder called 'Excel X' and cut and paste my Excel folder into that, so that my Excel folder no longer exists as it was. You could copy it to a thumb drive too, no problem. I would then try to restore the Excel folder to its original location and if it worked, delete the Excel X folder and carry on.

Any data you restore remains untouched in the backup file.

If it is an image you can still select which files and folders to restore, I've just tried it using an image I have in SZ.

 

Thanks Sparky,

I understand now. One thing that did confuse me is that SZ doesn't let you make filenames when you backup. If you have multiple full images how do you know which one is the latest. Or, since that would produce a duplicate will the oldest be deleted. Doesn't sound like it would be from reading the User Guide. I assume same "no filename required" would apply to smaller backups and individual files and folders being saved to SZ. Same problem would be there with no date information or title to know which one to select. Only did a full image so far. Guess I won't have that problem when I get an external drive.


Ken

 

No you can't name anything in the SZ, really it is intended to contain full and incrementals or differentials of the same system partition so that in the event of you not being able to boot to windows you can recover from it using the automatic recovery procedure which itself resides in the secure zone, although you can recover from SZ using a recovery CD too. When you try a recovery from SZ - and you can test this without doing proceeding with an actual recovery - TI will show you the backups available to recover from, including the date and time and type of backup and all that. It is always a good idea when you make any backup to add descriptive info about the backup, as this will show up too.

Initially I backed up different things to the SZ but thought it too confusing and unnecessary so I only keep images of C in it and use backup locations in a separate partition for other backups.

Yes, when you get an external drive it may have space to do full images or have it as one big SZ to backup things too but I think most people here would say don't do that. By all means have an SZ on it if you want too (you can only have one remember) but if i had an ext drive I would most likely not have an SZ on it at all and use the backup locations feature.

 

That's what I'll do Sparky,

Keep SZ on laptop for one full image and the try and decide feature maybe. I will put another full image on ext drive along with other types of backups.


Thanks,

Ken

 

Your welcome, glad to be of help. I'm sure like me that in a short time you will work out the best strategy for you.

 

Sparky,

I agree with you, I'm not using SZ for indvidual backup/restores or try and decide, just full images as a backup to the one I'll put on my ext HD. I'll use my laptops backup feature, my thumbdrive, and ext HD for all other backups. My test did not work well. My first test was to restore Mozilla from SZ to My Documents folder. This is the Mozilla under Ken/App/Roaming on my laptop, not the entire Mozilla program. It said it was successful, although it named it Firefox not Mozilla. But, when I looked into the restored folder it was missing some items.

1.






The first snapshot shows Mozilla on my C: drive, the second what was restored by TI to Documents. The Firefox folder is missing. If I do a full restore maybe that data is elsewhere to be restored.

2. The next attempt, I selected "restore absolute paths", not just the individual folder from a window I can't find again in trying to retrace my steps. Thought that would copy everything. It copied my entire Users/Ken folder that includes App/Roaming/Mozilla with all of Mozilla intact. However it labeled it C: in the documents folder.

3. On the third try, when I clicked on proceed the name of the info being restored started with MOD and had Photo in the description. This data is from my recovery partition. I canceled operation. But, it still put data in the documents folder and labeled it D:. That is the drive number Acronis assigned to my laptops recovery partition that was saved into the SZ as part of the full image backup. That partition was not selected for the restore process. Below is the snapshot of my documents folder with the Firefox, C:, and D: restores that were put there. I can't attach my last snapshot it exceeds the attachment KB limit. But, it shows some auto run files from the laptop recovery partition saved to SZ from my laptop.





I did a validate that said all was OK. Checked for errors on the C: and D: partitions imaged to the SZ. Everything looks OK on my Laptop. Only concern is that I read a note in help about canceling a restore that would have something to do with not allocating the space and needing to redo something to the partition. Also, my laptops C: dropped about 230MB, the size of the D: folder in my documents.

I guess I could delete these folders in the documents folder, since all is working, I think. I'll never no if anything is damaged in my laptops recovery partition or the full image in SZ until I use them. I don't see a problem, since you said the SZ data stays there and everything was transferred to the documents folder, not the original location. Just concerned on what happened when I canceled the one restore operation that somehow got to my D: recovery partition stored in SZ. Would think Acronis would not let anything happen to a computer by just canceling an operation. Seems like I can do what the help comments said to do when you cancel a restore operation, but I can't find where I read it and didn't understand it. Guess I got a long way to go with Acronis.

Sorry about the length and multiple issues. Also, my snapshots didn't upload correctly, I think. Hope they are OK when I submit post.

Any suggestions at this point. Hopefully not delete Acronis and give up. lol


Ken

I guess the fourth attch did make it showing contents of D: in documents.

 

oh no i wish you hadn't done that.
Let me look at this more closely and do nothing else yet.

 

First thing is, did you make a copy of the Mozilla folder?