Help for new user

I am planning to purchase the Acronis True Image Home 2009 software. As a new user, I have some simple questions. What brand and size external HD attached via USB would you recommend? Does it have to be a large as the HD in the PC, or just large enough to contain the total amount of data being used on the PC HD? Will the new stand alone HD have to be formatted before backup? What is the procedure to boot from the software CD when a restore is necessary? Does this require a BIOS change? These may stupid questions, but I do not have any experience with full HD bacup procedures. Thanks for your help and understanding.

 

1. What size and brand - You should by a hard drive that is at least 2 times larger than the drive yu plan on imaging. The brand really doesn't matter. I use Seagate drives exclusively.

2. The external hard drive will have to be formatted.

3. Procedure to boot rescue CD - Set your bios to boot from Cd/DVD first. Once you set the BIOS there really isn't any need to change it. Just put the CD in and boot the machine.

Once you create your first image, make sure you create your rescue CD and immediately boot from the rescue CD just to verify that it is bootable. Continue with a restore until you get to the screen where you have to click on Proiceed.
The reason to do this is to verify the rescue CD and that you can read your image file.

I do full backups exclusively. I do not do Clones.

 

If you buy a ready-made external hard drive, it will already be formatted. And quite likely it will be formatted as Fat32, and, while that is okay, the NTFS format is preferred nowadays.

Buy as large a hard drive that you can afford. The best price point (you get the best bang for the buck) these days is at the 1Tb level.

 

Hard drives formatted Fat will yield images made up of many files while
NTFS formatted drives will yield 1 large file. NTFS is preferred.

 

FAT32 RULES ! !

A 6 GB image is created as 1 file on NTFS or 2 files on FAT32

I have not tested on version 11, but on a previous version I found that a NTFS image took twice as long as a FAT32 image when restoring to the system drive C:\.

I guess that the LINUX drivers involved in reading the image file(s) are good with FAT32, but have a hard time with Microsoft flavoured NTFS.

I would also point out that Acronis use FAT32 when creating its Secure Zone.

I will be interested in any evidence that more recent versions of Acronis have much better LINUX drivers.

I suggest that any present or future version of Acronis will indicate continued superiority of FAT32 over NTFS if it still uses FAT32 for the Secure Zone.

Regards
Alan

 

Alan:

For another perspective on FAT32 vs. NTFS, see this thread. Personally, I wouldn't trust a fragile file system like FAT32 with my valuable backup data.

 

Thanks for your help. Along with the Acronis software, I purchased a Seagate 1 TB drive with an NTFS File system. The properties show that 95.4 MB of space is already used. It contains a Folder named Seagate that contains files Autorun.inf, SeagateDesktop.ico, SeagatePortable.ico, Seagate-Release.exe. Setup.cfg, and SerialNumber.xml.
It also contains files Autorun inf. and Setup.exe as standalone files. The sales person at Best buy said I do not need to format the drive before using it to store the backup. What should I do with the files that came with the drive? Should I just leave them there, assuming the backup load will go in some other folder, and not intermix with what came with the drive? I suppose I could copy these files to another CD, and delete them from the new HD if they will cause a problem with the backup. What are these files used for. It looks like one of them allows me to register the product.
Thanks again for your assistance. I am new at this backup/restore game.

 

The files that came preinstalled on the external hard drive are the manufacturers backup and restore programs. You do not have to use them.

I would leave them where they are. They will not be a problem.

When you do a backup, just direct it to the new 1tb hard drive. Backups do not have to be in any folder. They can reside as files on the drive.

 

The statement "Backups do not have to be in any folder. They can reside as files on the drive" confuses me. I thought if I did a full backup, it would put all my backup data in one place, like a folder. How can I be sure the files that came with the external HD won't be intermixed with my backup data and restored to my PC C drive during a full restore? I certainly have a lot to learn about this backup system.

 

cranheim:

The output of a True Image backup operation is a single file. It may be a huge file, but everything needed to restore your disk is contained in this single file. The file extension is .tib for True Image Backup; for example, My Backup June 7 2009.tib is what a backup file name might look like.

You can do anything that you'd like to stay organized. You can put your .tib files in folders or not put them in folders -- it's up to you.

 

The Seagate backup software is a simplified version of True Image, which may be all that you need. Have you looked into it? I believe it will even let you create a Rescue CD, but not sure.