Complete Restore Did Not Work as expected?

I started having Problems with programs after doing a WINDOWS XP restore. One Program misbehaving I uninstalled. When I reinstalled I chose fewer options under "CUSTOM INSTALLATION". That program seem to run fine, then I ran into another program that closed as soon as I opened it.

After dealing with these issues, I decided to Restore "Active-C" and Logical-D (partition with all my programs) from a Full Backup (just prior to an incremental backup, because the incremental backup contained an XML patch that started causing problems).

I chose not to restore my "E" partition since this is my DATA partition and no programs.

When I completed the "Full Backup" restore to the "C" and "D" partitions, I went to test the program that I had reinstalled before SYSTEM Restore. In the Start Menu, I noticed there were shortcuts to Program modules that no longer existed (these modules were installed as part of the original Image), since the RESTORE appeared to match the current installation.

When you do a restore, does it look at the current image and replace only the resident files? Why wouldn't the "D" partition be completely overwritten?

Is their a concept of TI I'm missing? It did not restore the state of the computer (very stable at time of full image backup).

How can I force it to act like a Clone Image restoration?

-Bob

 

When you restore an image, it's as if you deleted the old partition, then created a new partition and formatted it and finally restored all the files exactly as they had been when you made the image.

Any changes made after the image was made will be removed.

 

Hi John:

That's exactly what I would have expected. Here the scenario however and how it fell short (sorry it is rather long):

1) P-CAD 2002 Started acting up a few days ago
2) Last Night I uninstalled it
3) I then Reinstalled it (Custom) with fewer applications than original installation (original installation was sitting in a full backup made August 19th).
4) After finding another program acting strange, I decided to restore the Full Backup on my "C-PRIMARY" and "D-LOGICAL" (Logical has all my programs) partitions (I had an incremental I made last week but did not use it, and used the previous "FULL" backup instead).
5)When I went to test P-CAD 2002, the Start Menu listed all of the original applications (as it should), but applications indicated in the "Start" menu were missing. The missing programs were represented with default "Window" icons, not the application they use to point to (because programs were not restored).

The Acronis Restore Task list indeed stated it was to delete "C" partition, Restore, then Delete "D" Partition and restore it.

How could the Restore be missing the same P-CAD applications I decided not to install last night when I attempted a manual repair (by uninstall and Reinstall with fewer applications)?

Sounds confusing I know, but the restored image matched the current installation and not the full backup.

Its as if "D-Partition" was not restored even though it went through the process.

-Bob

 

Hello SierraTech,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that Acronis True Image 8.0 does not backup individual files or folders or applications, but saves blocks of your hard drive data, saving the information about the disk/partition geometry.

If you have successfully restored your image then the data should be exactly the same as it was at the moment when the partition\hard drive has been backed up.

Please make sure that you have created\restored an image of the entire hard drive instead of the image of the system partition only, since this is the only possible reason of not having some applications restored, especially if they were located on any other partition then system.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Hi Alexey:

Thank you for your reply!

I did a full backup of my drive on August 19th (all three partitions).

C:\ Active (Mostly OS)
D:\ Programs
E:\ Data

I understand Acronis is a cloning tool, hence it should capture and archive used data blocks.

What I tried to do is restore two of my partitions from a full backup (leaving the third partion out of the equation so ACRONIS does not overwrite the "E:\" partition.

Can this be done, or do I have to restore all three partitions (entire drive) to get my complete image back on C:\ and D:\ Partitions?

The 5 schedule tasks reported during restore are as follows:

1) Verify Image
2) Delete C:\ Partition
3) Restore c:\ Partition
4) Delete D:\ Partition
5) Restore D:\ Partition

As reported previously the Restored "D:\" partition contents did not match what was stored in the full backup, and matched the image of my current program installation I had done in my attempt to manually fix programs. It's as if the "D:\" Partition was not restored to original configuration.

One other piece of information I failed to mention, I never saw the message, "Deleteing Partition" as was schedule, but I recall seeing restore Partition messgaes.

Thank you for your help!

-Bob

 

Hello SierraTech,

Please be aware that you do not need to restore the image of the entire hard drive in order to get only C: and D: partitions restored. Acronis True Image 8.0 allows you to restore partitions selectively.

The only difference between restoring the image of the system partition and the image of the entire hard drive is that your hard drive's MBR will be restored only in the latter case.

However, I believe that your D: partition just has not been restored for some reasons.

Since I have never heard of such problems, I would like to ask you to restore your C: and D: partitions (or just only D: partition) once more just to make sure that you certainly have restored the image of the D: partition.

If the problem still persists and the data on your D: partition still has not been overwritten with the data from the image archive then please also do the following:

- Mount your image as a virtual drive using Explore Image wizard;

- Browse D: partition from the mounted image and compare it's content with the content of the actual D: partition. Especially, check for the programs that should be in the image of the D: partition, but not getting restored for some reasons. Inform me about the results.

Please also verify your image by means of the Check Image tool and tell me whether it verifies successfully.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

>>> Please also verify your image by means of the Check Image tool and tell me whether it verifies successfully.

This I already have done, and is shown in my previous post (Step 1: Verify Image).

>>> Since I have never heard of such problems, I would like to ask you to restore your C: and D: partitions (or just only D: partition) once more just to make sure that you certainly have restored the image of the D: partition.

I will restore both Partitions, because I had to uninstall P-CAD 2002 since it failed to work and was missing programs from restoration image. This changed the registry from Uninstall, so I will need to retore both partitions (C & D).

Interestingly enough, the "Entire" progress bar was way off the mark as to the percentage level completed before the "D:\" partition was restored (it stated something like 95% complete after 1) Verify Image, 2) Delete Partition 3) Restore "C:\" partion). The "D" restoration occured in the last 5% but took 10 minutes.

Is their a Restore Log we can look at?

>>> If the problem still persists and the data on your D: partition still has not been overwritten with the data from the image archive then please also do the following:

- Mount your image as a virtual drive using Explore Image wizard;

- Browse D: partition from the mounted image and compare it's content with the content of the actual D: partition. Especially, check for the programs that should be in the image of the D: partition, but not getting restored for some reasons. Inform me about the results.

I did this already, and that's where I discovered Programs located in the virtual image did not get restored. I will repeat the process.

Thank you for your help, I want to build confidence in this system since I suffered a Hard Drive Crash last June, and it took me two months to get 75% of everything installed, configured, patched and working. I like the idea of incremental images, in-liu of complete clones for my laptop.

-Bob

 

Okay now I'm totally confused how this happened.

Acronis Secure Zone no longer contains the three programs missing in the graphic:

1) InterPlace - PCS
2) Relay
3) Signal Integrity

I have no clue how they disappeared from the Secure Zone, unless Restore did some type of compare and removed these programs when I attempted to RESTORE after manually uninstall and reinstall of P-CAD 2002.

These are the very programs I chose not to install when I uninstalled the software last weekend, followed with a reinstall to fix a problem. How did they disappear from the Secure Zone (Made August 20)?

I did a restore this evening of "C" and "D" partitions, with the same result. Interestingly enough, I noticed the partitions are not deleted if the size remains the same, even though they are scheduled to be deleted.

Restore Last weekend made me reboot and restore from the Boot Sector version of ACRONIS since the "ACTIVE" partition was scheduled to be restored. This evening, I booted using F11 so not to go through the whole process of a reboot.

I am perplexed how the Secure Zone lost these three programs.

-Bob