Acronis Newbie - Former Drive Image User

Hi. I am new to using Acronis to back up my hard drive and am still trying to understand the process. I am used to PowerQuest's Drive Image program, which required a reboot to do a full system backup in dos.

I hadn't done a full system backup in quite a while (all personal data backed up however) and discovered that Drive Image 2002 will start up when the system reboots but immediately shuts down and the system restarts and loads to the Windows GUI. Not sure why it won't run when in dos and since Symantec took over, not sure I want to try to figure it out. Drive Image was real good to me, but I think it's time to move on.

1. How can Acronis do a full system back up while in Windows? I just can't comprehend the concept of active files being imaged. I made a bootable cd, which works great and loads usb drivers for my mouse and external usb hard drive.

2. Can I perform a full system backup to the external usb drive (Western Digital combo drive) by rebooting and booting from the bootable cd? I can see the drive when I boot from the cd, but haven't been able to successfully write to the drive. Suggestions?

Thanks in advance to everyone who can help me to successfully understand and operate Acronis. Backups are a blessing - especially when you get a new system and customize it. Drive Image used to restore my system to a good point in about 15 minutes from start to finish .... I am hoping to find that I will be able to get up and running quickly with Acronis also.

My system specs:
Windows XP Home (soon switching to XP Pro)
Gateway 500X, P4 Intel 2.4 GHz w/512K cache
512 DDR SDram
ATX 350W Power Supply
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card
60GB internal 7M Ultra ATA Hard Drive and an additional 30GB internal hard drive
160GB Western Digital Combo 7200rpm usb/firewire external hard drive
40x/12x/48x Recordable/Rewritable CDRW drive
16x/48x DVD-ROM drive
3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Diskette ID Drive

 

Have a read of this as to how drive imaging in Windows works. I use all the time and it really does work.

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/resource/tech-talk/2003/disk-imaging-1-introduction.html


Xpilot ( and also ex Drive Image !)

 

it really does work. We had a computer so infected with scumware and spybots we had to restore an acronis true image made from within windows. I tried using every spyware utility out there to cleanse it and nothing worked.
We've been using this imaged file restore for 6 months with no problems. it seems like we never lost it...now if I could just take an image of my body (say before my disastrous knee injury) that would be really slick

isn't the bootable CD a linux shell? maybe that's the problem. Your drive is a windows drive and Linux can't write to it. just guessing. Here's an option to try. Try connecting a network cross over cable to another machine and save it on that machine and then copy to the USb drive. Or create a separate partition on your hard drive and back up the primary drive to the 2nd partition and then manually copy the imaged file to the USb drive. there are lots of options to try.

Even though Acronis is really slick and those images within windows do work in the real world I STILL boot from the recovery CD and take the image from the CD utility. Like you, I like the idea of Windows not running when I take my image

I learned this from the forums and I've been doing it ever since.
I need to test the CD boot disk to see if it can write to my Rev drive for the image I haven't tried that yet.

 

Thanks for the comments Xpilot and Peter Mac. I am looking forward to my XP Pro OS CD becoming available to me so that I can fool around with this current os (XP Home) and restoring from a backup from internal hard drives, external hard drive and CDs. I wouldn't want to find that I couldn't restore and not have the XP Pro on hand to install. Thanks for sharing the link Xpilot because the article explains the "how-it-does-it," which was good reading. Peter Mac, I just learned about the linux in the link that Xpilot shared .... that's a good point. Well, I have an extra internal hard drive that I can do initial backups to and I'll try copying them over to the external drive and see how a restore goes.

?Another question: My os hard drive is about 56GB and it has been taking close to 4 hours to create an Acronis image with normal compression. Does this seem like a long time or like an appropriate amount of time?

 

Well, I have an extra internal hard drive that I can do initial backups to and I'll try copying them over to the external drive and see how a restore goes.

I think you would be better off creating a fresh image to the external drive rather than copying them but with that in mind give it a try it may work.

Xpilot

 

why? data is data, is it not? how would an image copied from a HD partition to a USb drive be any different than the original image?