Successful recovery--but question about incremental backup

I use Trueimage 9, build 2,302 on Win2K, SP4

I do a full backup each Sunday AM with an incremental backup nightly.

I successfully restored my image with my full backup from last 6 days ago and I have 5 incremental backups. The backups include C, D and E drives with my data on E drive, OS on C, and programs on D EXCEPT my email, which is on C drive.

The question now is how do I do the incremental restores? Can I do them running TrueImage booted from the recovery disk or do I boot into Win2K and then run the restore each of the incremental backups?

Thanks
Ken K

 

Either way.

See the User's Guide.


2302 is a very old, and as I recall, buggy version.
Update to latest version.

 

kdkrone,

The full image and the consecutive incremental image files, all comprise a multivolume archive. After you select any one of those files, you are presented with the various backup dates to select from to do a restore. You select the date you want to restore to and regardless of how many image files will be included into the restore process, you need to do it only once - all the incremental files required to restore to the state of the selected date will be included automatically in just one restoration run.

As Howard says, you should update to the latest TI9 build. Just keep in mind that the new feature (writing directly to DVD) introduced with the now current build 3633 is not working properly yet. Therefore, if you plan to write your images onto DVD, you better do it by storing the image files on HD first and then copy them to DVD by means of a third party burning program, like Nero or Roxio.

 

Well, I certainly did not understand the process at all. I thought I had to do a separate restore for EACH INCREMENTAL BACKUP!! No wonder I was looking at so much time to restore my hard drive. What I understand, then, is that if I have done a full backup on Sunday and daily backups through the week, then to restore everything to, say, Friday, I only have to choose Friday and the restore process uses all of the files to get to Friday.

Now, when I do a verify of the archive, does that verify the sum of all the days, i.e., the full backup and the subsequent days that I have accumulated?

Thanks so much,
Ken K

 

Right.

And right again. This, in fact, is the weak spot of extensive incremental imaging in TI. The n-th incremental file is fast to create but slow to verify, since the validate procedure will go down the whole chain to the original full image (inclusive) for every new incremental. But for the week-based strategy you are planning I believe incrementals are appropriate.

 

Thank you so much for setting me straight about how the program is set up. I am most appreciative.

While I have your attention, do you have any suggestion for a more efficient backup strategy? I am merely backing up my home computer and prefer to not lose email, spreadsheets, and other rather simple, but difficult to replace, data. I have a 120GB HDD for my C:, D:, and E: drives (one physical drive) and separate F: (250GB), G:, and H: (each 300GB drives). The F drive has backup for my computer and my wife's computer with space for many films, and the other drives are for films, as well, so I have plenty of space (I am presently building a system that will be mainly for storage, as hard drives are cheap, and that will be 1T of space).

I would be interested to entertain any suggestions you might have.

Thanks again,
Ken K

 

Hi again Ken,

Our approaches, yours and mine, are vastly different. I only make full backups, since the images are small and take less then three minutes to create. I run them manually at selected times and monitor the process. Most times I only backup C: partition which contains My Documents too.

My wife's treasured pictures are stored temporarily on D:, for editing. After that they are transferred to CDs and to eternal oblivion. The D: partition is imaged occasionally only.

And yes, I'm still happily married.

 

Longevity of data burned to CDs has become somewhat of a question as of late. Eternal oblivion may be only 5-7 years away.

 

Well, again I must be doing something wrong. To back up my three partitions, which comprise about 61GB, took me about 1 1/2 hours last night.

What might I be doing wrong that your process takes only a few minutes? (BTW, that was with build 3633, to which someone had suggested I update...)

Thanks
Ken

 

That really so? Didn't read anything alarming yet.

Maybe I should dedicate that external drive that didn't work in rescue environment to picture storage. Why not, I have 80 GB on idle there, after all, and they work in Windows.

Thanks rbmorse.

 

My three minutes are for a 4 GB image (validating done separately - that would take another 2 minutes) with normal compression, from internal SATA to internal SATA, with a 3.2 GHz processor and 1 GB of memory, from Windows. That's bound to go fast!

If you image to an external hard drive it would be slower. In fact, I would say your times are more or less normal for an external, though they differ from setup to setup. And bear in mind that files recorded in native compressed formats (like .jpg) don't shrink further upon imaging with compression but they still take up processor time going through the compression routine. They may even turn out larger, I heard.

So a partition with such files only would best be archived by plain copying with Win Explorer. That's how I archive pictures.

 

I am going internal PATA to internal SATA with only a 2.56 GHz processor with 1 GB of memory.

I will have to see if there is some tweaking that can be done. OTOH, those times were with the older build...

Thanks again for all of your explanations; I understand the program much better now.

Ken K