Image to flash drive fat32

Hello forum, I have bought a 16 gb flash drive that is fat32. I would like to image my hard drive which is about 10 gb for all of the operating system, files, and applications in the event of a hard drive crash or corruption. I have xp pro sp2 with 120 gig hd and 2 gig ram. Is it possible to image my entire system to this flash drive and use it to restore my computer in the event of failure? Do I have to reformat the flash drive to ntfs? My system is ntfs. I obviously have limited knowledge so any step by step would be appreciated. I have acronis t.i. 11 which I have just updated to the latest 8101 update. Thanks for any assistance.

 

Dave,
how is the flash drive connected? Via USB or SATA or ...?

And yes: You can image a NTFS-partition to a FAT32 formatted device.

For a step-by-step description you have to look in the signature of the member GroverH:
Klick
Choose "Beginner's Guides for TrueImage Home".

or the selfmade manuals of GroverH directly:
Klick

 

Just realize that the file size limits of FAT mean that any backup larger than 4 GB bytes will have be split into multiple files--ATI can do that but it's a complication one must deal with only for FAT drives. I'd convert the drive to NTFS. You can do this without losing any data on the drive.

 

I wouldn't call a complication. ATI just does automatically. It might be conventint if you want to copies backup to dvd

 

A lot of the larger USB flash drives suffer from slow write speed, but are relatively fast on reads. This will mean that it may take a while to create a backup image TO the flash drive, but restoring the image FROM the flash drive should go quicker.

For icing on the cake, use the Bootable Media Builder application in TrueImage (on the Tools menu) to make your flash drive bootable into the Acronis recovery environment. The app will take less than 50 MB of space on the drive, but you'll then have a self-contained device to recover your system. Plug it in, boot from it, and recover your system in the event of a failure.

And to answer your original question, if your used space on the hard disk is 10 GB then a backup image made using TI should be smaller due to compression; probably about 6 - 7 GB, so you should be able to store a couple of backups on your 16 GB drive.

 

If you backup from Windows directly to the flashdrive, I would check that TI booted from the CD can successfully validate the image. In my extensive flashdrive testing with TI, I had the most success when using TI from the CD to save the image directly to the flashdrive rather than doing it from Windows. However, that may have been particular to that computer.

 

Yes on both counts. However, I think it is the default setting in the newer version but I recall it needing to be set manually in prior versions -- I could be misremembering.

If I had to save backups to an optical. I suppose I'd use some third party burner to do it rather than make the backups themselves in ATI directly to optical. I mean if I felt I needed a long term archive on opticals -- in which case I'd use archive quality disks. Otherwise, I'd just store them on a harddisk, which will hold data integrity for about as long as an ordinary user-writeable optical disk.

Ever try restoring an ATI backup that is split over disks? Ever complete the job successfully? It can be done, but it's a process much more prone to error than using harddisks and unsplit files.

 

This is *exactly* the feature I was looking for in a backup product. Any idea if I can test this out with the Try-before-buy option of TI 11? I heard there are some restrictions when it comes to bootable media.

Also, it would be very nice If I could make this self-contained backup device restore an image without any user interaction. I'm thinking plug in the flash drive, boot from said flash drive, go have a cup of coffee and come back 30mins later and your hard drive has been restored. Any way to hack this in?

 

Yes, you can test this feature but with limitations. If I recall correctly you can create images with the Windows app for a limited time period. On the bootable recovery media you cannot create images with the trial version but you can restore them. So you could run some tests with the trial version to find out if the product suits your needs.

I think Paul (MudCrab) was working on this (and coming pretty close to success) but you can almost do this without hacking anything. You can plug in the flash drive, boot from it, and then click a few buttons on the GUI to start a restore. Go have your favorite beverage and then return later (about 1 min per GB to restore).

 

Yes, I was/am working on this (been busy with other things). I have made successful automated restores from flashdrives (and hard drives) using TI 11 (8,053) and Echo Workstation 9.5 (8,076) (I haven't tried the latest builds yet.) However, there are limitations that some users would find frustrating and the process of getting it setup is still not what I would call easy.

Also, I would note that setting up a completely automatic restore that starts without any user intervention when the flashdrive is booted is not a good idea. I changed it so that it's more like the One-Click Restore CD option. That way, you won't accidentally wipe out your drive if you boot with the flashdrive plugged in and didn't want to do a restore.