Ready to go, but a little worried...

Do I dare to restore my C drive?

Due to some windows related system breakdowns, I have spend 5 days toptuning my system, which is a professional recording system on a Dell INspiration 5150.

Now my windows XP pro SP2 is fully upgraded, all drivers and all system upgrades are done, all programs run fantastic and are upgraded. Now I only need to test if I can restore my C partition from an image.

I have installed the newest trial version of Acronis True Image (8.0 build 903)and succesfully created an image of my C partion onto the secure zone on my D partition.

I can´t close down all programs, but I am ready to hit the Boot button and go on. I have created a bootable CD of Acronis just in case.

Do I need to worry about anything before I "erase and restore" my five days of work? I am of course ready to buy the program - since it is a very fair price to pay to secure my big work.

Looking forward to hear from anybody.

Lars Twin, Denmark

 

I'm "sure" it will work but it's not worth the risk of a failure. I certainly wouldn't restore an image unless I HAD to do it. I've restored many images but I always had a reason.

Now you need to get your image off that HD in case there is a hard drive failure. DVD, second HD, network share or external HD for long term storage.

 

Thank you very much Brian!

I will try to copy/backup the image elsewhere.

Still I would like to try to restore the image, to be sure I can do this later. Working with audio in windows will crash the computer / make it run unstable after some time of use. It is just a question of when...

Best regards

Lars Twin

 

To be completely sure of your backup and recovery process I would suggest that you first backup the whole of your hard drive to external media. The best place is an external hard drive.

Now remove your existing hard drive and replace it with a brand new drive straight from it's box. The next step is to boot from the recovery disk and restore your backup image to your computer. Reboot and you are done.

All this may seem to be a bit OTT but it is exactly what I did when I first got Acronis TI. I take daily images and could be up and running in less than an hour following any HDD or software disaster.

Richard

 

Hello Lars.

Short of doing an actual restore, you can gain some peace of mind by carrying out the following:

1. Create a "Full" bootable rescue CD (or floppies if you have to).
2. Use TI's Check Image Wizard to verify your recently created image.
3. Rename your hard drives/partitions so that they are called something meaningful e.g. System, Backup, Data, etc. The reason for this is that the drive letters seen after booting from the Linux based rescue disk will be different to those seen in Windows.
4. Use the Explore Image Wizard to mount the image as a virtual drive and check that you can copy files from it to your physical hard drive and access them without errors.
5. Boot from the rescue CD/floppies and check that TI correctly detects your hard drives/partitions, be they internal or external, RAID or otherwise.
6. Work through the Restore Image process up to but not including clicking the Proceed button (nothing gets commited until the Proceed button is selected).

If everything is alright up to this point you can be pretty confident that, when the time comes, an actual restore will work as advertised.

However, I wholly agree with Brian - do not rely on backups that are stored on the same physical drive as your OS/applications/data.

Regards

If everything is