Backing up from external USB 2.0 Hard Drive

I am just beginning to use True Image 10 and wanted to verify a few items:

1) If I had to boot using the Acronis system disk, would it put me in an environment that will automatically support my external 2.0 USB drive, where my backup will be located?
2) Are the Recovery instructions fairly straight forward?

Sometimes this kind of answer is difficult to get clearly when trying to read a 95 page User Manual onscreen.

Thanks

 

Your USB drive should be supported from the recovery CD. However, every now and then there is a model that doesn't work properly or suffers from poor performance. These problems are usually due to a poor driver on the recovery CD which is Linux-based.

If this happens, you can contact Acronis and they may be able to provide you with a .iso image of the recovery CD with a better driver. The other option is to create a BartPE disk which is Windows-based and contains good drivers.

If you aren't familiar with BartPE do a Google search on it and have a look at this thread:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=162424

The chances that your USB drive will work with no problem is quite good but I mentioned the options just in case.

You will read on this forum that you do not know if you have a good backup strategy unless you test it by doing a complete restore. If you only have one drive this takes a bit of intestinal fortitude because if it doesn't work you have a problem. Some users buy, beg, borrow a HD to do a test. If you don't want to do that the next best thing is to create your archive on your USB drive, boot up the TI CD and see if you can find your archive on the USB drive, then Validate it. Validating causes the entire archive file or files to be read and a checksum calculated which must match the checksum in the file. If TI does this and also the speed is fairly reasonable then there is a good chance you will be able to recover.... but you don't really know for sure!

The recovery instructions are fairly straight-forward and are wizard driven just like the backup and validate. Even though the recovery environment is Linux, the interface is graphical and you really don't even know you are in Linux.

Your recovery CD will ask you if you want to start in Full or Safe mode. Select Full because it will load the USB drivers. Some motherboards will run in Safe mode (which actually is a form of DOS) and can handle the USB via BIOS. Even if your board supports this, experience shows it to be painfully slow.