TI 7 : some experiences

I have waited much too long to upgrade from my TI-6 to TI-7 (although I had bought the upgrade some time ago).
Here are some preliminary experiences.

Why now?
Well, in a few days I have to use TI-7 on a friends new machine (just bought TI-7 for her) so I -finally- needed some experience with it on my own machine.

My Acronis apps
I have most of the Acronis apps.
Last installations were DiskDirector (installed without OS Selector) and finally TrueImage 7 build 613.

My machine
Windows 98 SE, Dutch, IE 5.5 SP2
P3 600; mobo Asus P2b; 512 MB RAM.
Two small internal HD's.
Plextor internal SCSI CD reader and CD burner, connected to very old SCSI-card.
Floppy and ZIP-100 drive.
External HD for backup (later more about that).

History
I had used a Maxtor external Personal-Storage USB-2 HD (80 GB) connected to a Sitecom USB-2 card.
Not any problem to let TI-6 make backup-images to it and restore from it.
No problem to password protect the images.
I did let TI-6 split up the images into parts of about 600 MB.

Now
That external Maxtor HD crashed (I don't know why).
So I bought a new one: Maxtor One-Touch 160 GB USB-2 + firewire.
I also bought a Sitecom Combo-card for USB-2 + firewire, and replaced the old Sitecom USB-2 card with this Combo-card.
To prevent possible problems with the size of 160 GB of the new Maxtor on my W 98 SE system, I split it up into two partitions of about 80 GB each.
I used both Acronis Partition Expert and Partition Magic to do that.
I know that I am no expert with partitioning programs, and indeed I had some trouble to make those two partitions. Most likely due to my own fault the partitioning with Partition Expert was not completely succesful but Partition Magic was able to repair that.

What I want
I know that TI-7 can do a lot more than TI-6 but I still want to use TI-7 like I was using TI-6.
That means no secure-zone, no incremental updates etc, just making full backup images on the moment I want to do that.
Of course I might well change my mind in the future !

Running processes and services
I noticed these three:
1.
Acronis Scheduler2 Service
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Acronis\Schedule2\schedul2.exe
2.
Acronis Scheduler2 Service
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Acronis\Schedule2\schedhlp.exe
3.
Acronis True Image Monitor
C:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImage\TrueImageMonitor.exe

First I thought that I didn't needed those 3 running, but I suppose I made a mistake here, so I allowed the first two (allowing/disabling through RegRun Gold).
About Acronis True Image Monitor I am not sure. Somehow I suppose that I don't need it running since I only want to make full backups at the moment I choose to do so. But maybe I am making a mistake here... Anyhow, for the moment I have that one disabled via RegRun.

Connecting the external HD
Although I can connected it now both via USB-2 or firewire, I decided to connect via USB-2.
My older Maxtor didn't have a power on/off button, but the new Maxtor OneTouch does have one.
I don't want it anymore always running and connected.
So what I do, is:
It is usually off and not connected.
When I want it connected, I first put its power on, wait a little while and then connect its USB-2 cable to my Sitecom-card.
A little icon comes up then in my taskbar through which I can safely disconnect it.
When I want to disconnect it, I first click that icon, a little menu pops up telling that I now can safely disconnect it, the External HD stops spinning, I disconnect its USB-2 cable from my machine and then I put its power off.

Bootable media
Just like with TI-6 you can with TI-7 make bootable media; I use those when I want to restore a backup.
I decided to make the full version of the bootable media; now requiring 6 floppies.
Then I write-protected those floppies.

Making a backup
TI-7 has a really nice interface !
I had already started and connected my external HD.
TI-7 saw the external HD.
The menus of TI-7 for making a backup are slightly different from TI-6 due to its more options, but as said I only want to make a full backup.
As I did in TI-6 I password protected the backup image of my C drive.
I split it up into parts of 650 MB.
All went well !

Check image
TI-7 has now build in the option to check/verify a backup image, nice !
Checking went fine.

Restoring a backup
I rebooted my machine with the bootable floppies.
TI-7 saw my external HD and gave nice info.
BUT: alas, I needed of course to put the password in but there was no way I was able to do so...

Again
I made again a backup image of C, but this time not password protected.
Restoring the backup (using the bootable floppies) was this time OK
(although first TI-7 told me again it was password protected, which it wasn't; but finally it was OK, maybe I myself did something wrong...).

Restored backup image OK
This is NOT a scientific test !!!
Just only a little test for myself but I thought I'd let you know.
I have on my D-drive my file-integrity-checker NISFileCheck installed; so this one is not affected when I restore a backup of C.
I let NISFileCheck check all exe, dll, ocx, vxd, sys, bat, com files plus lots and lots of other files included manually (there are thousands and thousands in its database now).
Before making the backup and after restoring it I ran NISFileCheck.
Not any file, checked by NISFileCheck, was changed, deleted or new added.
(a little remark comes later).
I also have the file-integrity-checker ADinf32 Pro, installed on C.
I did run that one also before and after (ADinf32 checks ALL files).
A few changes were made but absolutely nothing to worry about !!!
For example a new file was added in the scripts-section of TI:
C:\Windows\Application Data\Acronis\TrueImage\Scripts\<deleted by me>.tmp.tib.tis

In the past I made for myself a little bit more thoroughly test on TI-6 using also ADinf32 Pro and comparing the registry using BeyondCompare. I don't know whether I have the energy to do such thing again...

Note-1:
After restoring the C backup image I did run a quick scandisk.
It found some errors on C; I let it repair them.
This could very well be caused by my own fault.
I should later do the whole process again to see if it happens again.

Note-2:
I wrote that NISFileCheck did not find any changes after restoring the backup.
That still is absolutely true !
But a little remark:
When I first tried to make a backup unsuccesfully (the two Acronis Schedulers were not running at that time), I saw a new file was added:
c:\tildr.sys


Final remark
I want you to see this only as a preliminary experience.
I apologize for not earlier doing this and in a far more better way.

Wish
I hope that in a future version of TI-7 the issue with not being able to use the password-protection feature will be fixed

 

Hey FanJ - thanks for the post.

I'm getting ready to setup my PC with a Maxtor OneTouch 160GB external hard drive. I plan to use TI7 as my primary backup program. I trust that my experience will be a positive one. Like you, I plan to post my results to this forum.

I have one minor comment based on the following passage from your post:

I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but the Maxtor OneTouch has a Power Management feature that will spin down the drive when it is not in use. The timeout is user configurable. With this feature, you can leave the drive turned on all the time but save power and device wear-out when it's not in use.

That's all for now. Good luck on your computing endeavors.

Regards... timos

 

Hi Timos !

So far my own experience was positive (only that password-protecting issue needs to be fixed).
But I know that some others had some other issues, for example with RAID; as far as I understood Acronis is working on that.

Looking forward to your experience

Thanks for the hint, Timos !!!
Indeed I forgot that one...
Well, I'll decide in the future whether to use it that way or to power it off if I don't use it.


Something else:
I saw that you too, like me, are using W 98 SE.
I did get some contradictory advices about using an HD with the size of 160 GB on a Windows 98 SE machine. That's one of the reasons I decided to split that external HD up into two partitions.

Cheers, Jan.

 

FanJ,

Thanks for your comments.

I agree with you regarding your statement below:

I definitely plan to partition my 160GBs (probably into three partitions). I think the issue to which you refer is discussed in the Maxtor OneTouch User's Guide (see note 3 on page 49).

Here's the note:

Another size issue with Windows 98SE (which uses FAT32) is that a given file cannot exceed 4GB. This means that you will have to let TI7 break up your image backup file (if it's larger than 4GB) into multiple smaller files.

My internal HD, for example, is a Maxtor 80GB drive. It could, therefore, take TI7 as many as twenty image files to backup my system. I plan, however, to re-partition my internal HD into at least two partitions. I plan to put the Windows OS files into a separate 16GB partition. That means I could backup my critical Windows run-time environment to four (or less) 4GB image files. No big deal - I hope.

I'm going to install my new drive tomorrow. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Regards... timos

 

Hi Timos,

I have to admit that I'm still not sure about the size of an HD that Windows 98 SE can handle.
Yep, you're right, one of the sources was indeed the manual of the Maxtor OneTouch; other advices came from Maxtor-support and the shop.
Anyhow, I too definitely wanted to be on the sure side and did split it up in two partitions to avoid any possible problems (if they would occur at all....).

Some other thoughts:

You might like to consider to split up your backup images by TI-7 into parts that fit on a CD or DVD.
Why?
Just to be sure.....
Your external HD might crash (like my previous one did)...
Having a backup image split up into those parts, allows you to burn them on a CD or DVD after putting them on your external HD by TI.
Another advantage might be that you avoid any problem with that 4GB issue on W 98 SE (but I admit that my brain is not fully working at the moment LOL ).

Cheers, Jan.