Can a restore be "un-done"?

If you've restored your HD by using a recovery cd, and restored your hd using true image, there is no "undoing" it, right. If you had multiple images you could restore the different images, but you can never go back to the time and place your computer was at just prior to the restore? It seems obvious but I had to ask.

Let's say your computer wont boot, but you know you have a critical file on it that has not yet been imaged. If you boot from the cd, can you make an image of your hd as it exists now, in its presumably damaged state, and then restore a different (better) image? Then can you mount the image you made just before the restore and recover the critical file (assuming it wasn't a part of the problem to begin with)?

 

Hello jaxx,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

The procedure you described is quite correct. Acronis Bootable CD includes the wizard that allows you to create the image. Please store the image of the damaged system not to the same disk where you want to restore another image.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman

 

thanks very much

 

You are clever to figure this out. It's not obvious that you should make an image (via the ATI Recovery CD) of a screwed up partition, but that's exactly right since you can "Explore" it later to recover all sorts of data files including e-mail, address books, Quicken data, photos, music and My Documents.

 

Hello John,

Acronis True Image will make an image of any partition even if it is screwed in some way. It will image sectors not files so after you explore the image you will be able to copy necessary files.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

I've now restored many times and had to lose weeks of work before it dawned on me to create an image before doing anything even remotely risky. TI is, in my opinion, the biggest timesaver ever if you're going to do any experimenting on your PC. It allows me the oportunity to test things I never would have tried before. You can always delete "pointless" images.

 

Feddup
What sorts of experiments have you tried?