Acronis Home 2009 and FAT32

I'm a new but enthusiastic user of Acronis Home 2009.

Unfortunately our occasional network maintenance guy is not familiar with Acronis, and looking at our backups says that using an external USB drive formatted to FAT32, because of the 4gb max sector size, will make it impossible to restore my backups.

Especially, I guess, if a file is over 4Gb in size.

Should I be using an NFTS formatted drive?

Thanks.

 

No, ... using a Fat32 drive will not prevent Acronis from either making a Backup Image nor Recovering that Image. True Image will know to split the backup, if larger than 4 Gb. Only if you prefer to have the Backup file as one file and it is over 4Gb would you have to convert to NTFS.

 

Many thanks, just what I need.

 

Although ATI works as well on Fat as on NTFS, you might wnat to change your drdives to NTFS anyhow. It's a more reliable file system; it's a journaling file system so crashes, sudden power outages, disconnects, and other problems don't usually leave you with a bunch broken files with missing/missallocated and orphaned sectors. IT has a few other imporvements over the old FAT system, which was in fact very lean but didn't really have any legs

 

Hello Boswell,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

You can convert FAT32 to NTFS without loosing your data. To convert a FAT partition to NTFS, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
2. At the command prompt, type CONVERT driveletter: /FS:NTFS.
3. Convert.exe converts the partition to NTFS.

Thank you.

--
Oleg Lee

 

Many thanks, guys, received and understood.

My aim is to achieve a copy of my hard-drive, and to restore to a new (larger drive) on the same PC (say A). I have created a bootable rescue CD.

My further question:

If I backup to another PC (say B) on our network, surely, in case of complete disaster and the original drive (on PC A) is not useable, I won't be able to restore back across the network as PC A will not be configured on the network.

So, is it preferable to backup to an external drive (even a USB drive)?

I am using Grover Hatcher's Beginner's Guide to creating a basic full disk archive (available on this forum).

Thanks.

 

You should be able to restore PC A from a backup that is stored on PC B across the network. Wired Ethernet is supported in the Acronis recovery environment (but wireless is not). Try this -- boot your PC A from the recovery CD and pretend that you are going to do a restore. Start the restore wizard and when it asks for the location of your backup file, look in the browse list to see if you can see other PCs on your home network. If you can, this should work.

 

I do backups to computers across a wired network in the way that you describe. I do these as a secondary backups to the main backups which are to USB hard drives and secondary internal hard drives in hard disk caddies.

Restoring also works in this way across a network.

To be sure its works I recommend you do what K0lo has said above or do an actual restore.

One word of advice. The Aconis boot disk sometimes takes ages (several minutes) to finally get the network computer running. At first I thought that the Acronis Boot disk programs had hung. So be patient and wait for everything to boot up and hopefully then you can see other computers across your network.

 

Many thanks for the answers - invaluable.

I have created an Acronis Boot CD.

I have reconfigured my boot sequence to try the CD-ROM first. It appears to boot OK, but how can I see whether it has booted from the CD or the hard drive?

It boots whether I have the boot CD in or out, and there appears to be no resultant difference.

(I realise I could be straining your patience - apologies).

 

Your hard drive boots into Windows. The CD boots into an Acronis Menu.
Which do you see?

 

Windows. I'll have to think about that one.

The utility menu gives me a choice of making the CD-drive #1 in the boot sequence, but there are 2 CD-drives, so that could be the problem. I'll try the other drive with the boot CD.

 

OK, I've fixed that by selecting the CD drive and deselecting the others, and it now boots into True Image and I've selected the Full version option.

Unfortunately the screen is almost unreadable - it's all there, but heavily distorted. I've tried playing around with the monitor contrast control, but that hasn't helped. Maybe I have to change the resolution. More thinking.

This problem is already mentioned on this forum:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=227210

Unfortunately the solution is via chat and, for some reason, not published. I'm using a Dell machine as well.

 

I went to Acronis chat, and was given a link to download an ISO (image?) of the rescue C, and given another link to download a choice of ISO burning software.

The first software for XPPro said it did not support my processor (Dell Pentium (R) CPU 2.66GHz).

The second burning software seemed OK, and I burned the Acronis software to my CD.

Wound it up again and got into the TI menu sequence, just about readable, though clunky. I could choose my source and target, but the control sequence buttons were not in view (Next? Enter? Start?).

It appears incompatible. But with what? My Dell PC? My monitor? My processor? My op/system?

I've lost a day's work, and can't afford our network guy to have a go (I won't mention which software he's suggested), and have to admit I'm losing heart and taking the dog for a walk to calm down. My initial enthusiasm is waning.

All I want to do is backup my PC and restore, using reliable, straightforward software, and I felt Acronis could be the answer. It's a target still over the horizon for me. No, I'm obviously not a computer technician, just an end-user, but surely this software is designed to be utilised by a semi-intelligent end-user, or is this really only for IT professionals? I'm using the Home edition which I would have thought was more than adequate for my purposes.

 

This has reference to the chat had with you regarding menu options not appearing when using boot CD.

I would request you to boot from the CD and on the first screen that you see please select the 7th or the 8th option which reads “low graphic”and proceed and see how it works.

This was from Acronis Chat Support. I'm following their advice.