Acronis TI 11-Confused and needing much clarity

I have many questions and I have read much but still very confused. My hope is that someone or few could help bring clarity.
"The teacher will appear when the student is ready"

Just purchased TI and the good news is I have been successful performing a fullback of old internal HD and restored to new HD in my laptop...same gigs.

Please advise on the following...I'm not a techie. It took me 4 days to figure out how to backup and restore if that tells you anything!

1.) It took almost 5hrs for my 75gb full backup to restore to new HD. Most, of the data are in .avi and .wav format...is this normal? if yes, is there a better way to cut down on the time to restore? if yes, please advise or direct me to a link or a source.

2.) what's a partition?
Is there a difference between a full backup vs mounting an image vs cloning?
Do they all accomplish the same objective...to get the new HD to look and act like the old?
If yes, what's the advantage/disadvantage of one method over another?

3.) How do I backup or is it called imaging or cloning just my software, applications, everything I need without all the .avi, .wav, docs, basically everything but my data?

3.a) Then how do I backup (or whatever its called) all my data seperate from the above.

4.) how do I delete backup files using acronis?

Thanks in advance to all who are willing and wanting to teach this "grasshoppa"
I have more questions but will post later

I emailed acronis yesterrday and haven't head back yet. They we're pretty quick when I was a prospect but now that i'm a client...well, why bother

Dmitch

 

Was the backup file stored on a USB drive and did you run the restore from the boot/rescue CD?
If so, I’m guessing that the USB drivers on the CD aren’t the ones needed for your hardware and you wound up restoring at USB 1.1 speeds.
Just a guess.

 

I stored the backup file onto my Seagate external HD and I did use the TI rescue media on CD to restore.

 

If you want speed you need to partition your hard drive. By partition it means to divide your hard drive into 2 or more sections.

example that most people use is to divide your hard drive into 2 sections
C: for operating system/important programs only
D: for data/large programs/games/movies/mp3's

Use true image to backup your c: partition which if it only includes your operating system/antivirus/firewall /etc will be less that 15gb (should take less than 20 minutes to backup with normal compression.)

Just use windows explorer /copy and paste to backup your D: data partition, no compression required (and actually safer not to compress) to your external hard drive.

5 hours is too long to backup a hard drive. My c: drive is 20gb with 6gb in use, takes me 5 to 6 minutes to backup and about 10 minutes to restore.

 

ATI restores can be quite slow on some hardare setups if a USB is involved. The suspeicion is that the linux drivers are forcing ATI to treat the USB as version 1.1, which is about ten times slowers than USB 2.

A VistaPE disk would do a restore at about the same speed as an ATI backup done under windows.