Basic Set Up?

Since Acronis sells a product and then charges $30 for support, I hope to find some help here. I must admit that although I consider myself a competent computer user, back up and image and partitions are mysteries to me. I just bought an external hard drive on which I hope to keep a good backup and then automatic incrementals. I also plan to keep my working music and pics on the new drive to relieve pressure on my old, small hard drive.

I tried a full backup but got immediately confused about "image must be kept in different partition." I understand this theoretically but have no idea which the image file is, and how to create a partition to hold it.

Should the backups be kept in a separate partition from my working files? How would I do that?

I'm very frustrated and would look forward to any and all help - just setting it up once and forgetting it. Thanks in advance.
-Bob

 

You are probably making it harder than it is.
Start up True image.
Create backup.
Pick your C:\ drive as the source if that's what you want to image.
Pick your external hard drive as the destination if that's where you want to put the image.
If your C: drive and external drive both have only one drive letter each, you don't have to worry anything about partitions.

If you keep your music/pix only on your external drive, you're going to have to back them up to something else, DVD's maybe?
You shouldn't keep your backups on the same drive as the original since that would defeat the purpose in case the drive failed.

 

Why would he have to back his files up to something else? He got an External Hard Drive to back up all his files, and also...Acronis files as well. There is absolutely no problem with having other files on there as well. Unlike other "Disc Imaging" programs, Acronis just makes ONE file for a FULL backup. But however, it makes many different ones for "Differential", and "Icrement". I've made Acronis back-ups to Externals with many other files on them as well.
Getting another External HD for JUST Acronis files only...is a choice, ...not a requirement.

 

When I said "If you keep your music/pix only on your external drive, you're going to have to back them up to something else, DVD's maybe?"
The "them" in that sentence was meant to mean his music/pix files if those were his only copies, not the image backups of his C: drive.
Sorry, I reread the sentence and it could have been meant the other way but that wasn't my intent.

 

I think your confusion starts with your plan to employ two drives to store the OS and working files and to use one of those drives for TrueImage backups, as well.

In short, you can use TI to create a backup of one or the other hard drive but you can't create one backup image that contains files from both your internal AND external drive at the same time.

You might want to consider keeping your OS and all working files on your internal drive and making backup images of it and storing them on your external drive. That way, your backup image contains everything.

You can also keep your own archives of files on the external drive along with the TI backup images as long as there's room.

In general, you do not want to create a backup of your internal drive and then try to save or store that backup image in the same partition or on the same drive. Obviously, a backup image is created to protect against drive failure or corruption so it should be located elsewhere for safekeeping, like on another drive, etc.

One exception is when you use the Secure Zone for keeping your backup image. It allows you to store a backup of your hard drive in a "hidden area" of the same hard drive for convenient restoring in the event of corruption or undesired changes to the OS or data on your visible portion of your drive. However, if your drive becomes defective because of hardware faults your Secure Zone feature will probably become useless so it is of rather limited usefulness.

There are many backup strategies. This is only one. Hopefully it helps you begin to formulate the one that will work for you.

 

Thanks very much for the help. I made a valid backup today and didn't worry about the fine points. Still do not know where this image file I should move is or what its called. The backup resulted in six seemingly identical volumes (?). Made a boot disk as well. Here's the problem: I bought the external drive to take pressure off this aging, almost full hard drive. Would it be better for me to run everything off the new huge drive and backup to the old? Would once again appreciate all advice - I'd like this 6 yr old computer to last until Vista's been out for a while. Thanks again.

 

Do a file search for *.tib and search all folders on all drives--including the external--if necessary. Their names and locations will be displayed--unless you created a Secure Zone(?)

If it were me, I would invest just a little bit more money and buy a replacement for your older system drive. Hard drives are "on sale" almost continuously so you would have only a nominal cost.

Since you have a 6 year old machine, it will not support the new larger drives. You have not indicated the size of your current drive but it would probably support a 40G or maybe 80G. You could check the date of your bios which would give you a clue as to what it supports.

You could use ATI and restore a full disk image to the new drive and then switch drives. It would be possible to use the old drive as a slave in your existing machine but that might not be a good thing considering the age of the drive. You could carefully store it for temporary use only in the case of a disaster which might render a new drive as not-usable.

External drives are best used as additional storage--rather than a part of your everyday usage. If your current drive is almost full, then I would replace the drive and continue to use the external for storage. Remember, a lightning strike, etc could destroy any hard drive attached to your systems. I would connect the external only when used (short term usage) and then disconnect after usage. Some things could even be copied to DVD or CD as additional security. Be prepared should disaster strike!

 

You could get a new 200-300 GB hard drive and clone your old one over, then switch them so you boot to the new drive.
Move all your music/files back to your C: drive from the external one.
Then continue to backup to your external drive.
If your backups are multiple files, the external drive is probably FAT32 instead of NTFS. NTFS can have files greater then 4 GB.

 

Hello ryes,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

I am sorry for the delayed response.

First of all would like to tell that Acronis company do provide free support. You can submit a request for technical supporthere. E-mail based support is free option. The paid support option you mentioned is for Phone Support. If you wish to resolve the problem via phone please visit our on-line store at regarding the purchase of phone priority support.

Please note that while operating in Windows you can actually place the backup archive to the same partition which you are backing up. However, we always recommend that you store the archive farther from the original partition. For example, saving the archive to another hard disk will protect your data if your primary disk is damaged. Data saved to a network disk or removable media will survive even if all your local hard disks are down.

Since you have the external hard drive I would recommend that you store the backup archive there. Please find step-by-step instructions on how to create the backup archive in Chapter 5. "Creating backup archives" in the Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User's Guide.

This is most likely because the filesystem in your external USB hard drive is FAT32. It has 4 GB file size limit. Please note that in order to restore the data you can select any of this volumes Acronis True Image 9.0 Home automaticall recognise all its volumes.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov