New Version 10 user needing OS restore help

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by craigm6, Aug 8, 2007.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. craigm6

    craigm6 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Aug 8, 2007
    Posts:
    3
    Acronis Home V10 was recommended to me for what I am trying to accomplish. I have a student who is going to college soon the university does not support vista. So we have spent the last several days downgrading the laptop to XP. The machine is operating as it should and I want to be able to allow him to quickly restore XP to the exact state that it is right now.

    I am not interested in dual boot systems.

    So with purchasing Home 10, it appears that I can provide a means to restore the XP machine. My problem is I don't find a step/step help file to show me how to do this and the terminology in the user's manual is too foreign to me.

    I downloaded the Home 10 software and have created a Acronis Bootable Media Builder CD as outlined in Chapter 10 of the users manual. I know that this CD is working because to test the CD, I took it to another machine I don't care about and started the machine with the Acronis Bootable CD installed. When the machine boots up, the Acronis interface becomes active in memory - so I have gotten this far.

    So with my Acronis Bootable CD in hand and my student's working XP Laptop ready for use, how can I give him the means to be able to restore the laptop just as it sits at this point in time?

    Thank you.
     
  2. DwnNdrty

    DwnNdrty Registered Member

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2007
    Posts:
    3,335
    Location:
    Florida - USA
    You need to get an external hard drive. When you do, boot with the CD, choose Backup from the menu and go through the process. Choose the external drive as the Destination for the Backup Image.

    When the process is done you will have a backup stored on the external drive.

    Now here's the kicker ... the only way to know 100% that the Image will restore correctly is to do an actual restore (by booting from the CD and using the Recover feature). However it is highly recommended that you do this to a spare hard drive in case something goes wonky. I know in the case of a laptop this involves some work and extra cash outlay.

    The Validation feature in True Image sometimes gives false positives so until you do an actual restore you cannot be sure your Image is good.
     
  3. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

    Joined:
    Oct 27, 2004
    Posts:
    3,710
    I don't think it's a false positive; the file is usually valid. The probs when they occur are more often a failure of the Linux OS (and the available set of hardware drivers) on the restore/boot CD to deal with a restore on a particular machine.

    Consistently actually writing a bad tib file is more liekly a hardware prob, CPU performance uder stress, intermittently bad ram. . .

     
  4. farmerlee

    farmerlee Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jul 1, 2006
    Posts:
    2,585
    The easiest thing to do is create a secure zone on the laptops hard drive, this will allow you to create an image of xp and help keep it safe. The first thing you need to do is figure out how much space you'll need for the secure zone. The best way i figure is to create an image and see how big it ends up being. Make the secure zone slightly bigger than the image size. After that make an image in the acronis secure zone and activate the boot up manager so its easy to boot into trueimage if a restore is needed.
     
  5. craigm6

    craigm6 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Aug 8, 2007
    Posts:
    3
    Thanks for the responses.

    I like the idea of the external hard drive. If I understand the full versus safe Acronis Boot CD, the full version will load enough info and allow the machine to see the external USB hard drive upon restore.

    I have a 95 gig hard drive in the laptop and a 120 gig USB hard drive. Lets say I have 20 gig of hard drive space used now, leaves 75 gig free. So if I do an entire backup, I get an image of the full 95 gig drive.


    When I restore, the 20 gigs comes back along with the rest of the empty 75 gigs of NTFS file system.

    I understand the safe zone concept. This approach does not help you if the hard drive fails that has the safe zone on it, where the external drive does.

    But to further understand the safe zone concept, if I created a safe zone say of 25 gig and backed up my 20 gig of files:

    First off I don't have any confidence that using an explorer type window that I am getting not just the files but also the OS (hiden files, MBR) etc.

    Also on a restore, does the restore process take the 75 gig and reformat the original drive to NTFS?

    Bottom line, I can visualize what an "image" is, I don't see how a "backup" will restore the drive other than just the files.

    The two terms image and backup are tossed around and I don't think they mean the same thing.

    Also can someone explain what an ISO "image"? is? ie is Image the correct term? Why does the Acronis "make bootable disk" routine let you do an Iso as opposed to a full or safe mode disk?
     
  6. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2006
    Posts:
    6,483
    Location:
    California
    TI backs up only used sectors, leaves out the swap file and hibernation file and, by default, uses compression so your 20GB may end up creating an image file around 12-15GB depending on your file types.

    When TI restores, it deletes the existing partition and recreates it. The format of the new partition is the same format that is being restored. If you backed up an NTFS partition then the partition that is restored will have the NTFS format.

    TI used to just do image based backups (entire disks, partitions). Now TI also does files & folders type backups, which let you select specific files and folders to include in the backup file. Generally image backups refer to disks and partitions. If someone just says "backup", you'd better clearify which they mean.

    The ISO file is a CD image file that can be burned onto a CD. The CD will then be bootable (assuming the ISO contains a bootable image). It's basically just all the files that would be on the cd contained in one standard file format. Acronis Media Builder gives you the option of creating the file because sometimes people have problems creating a CD directly with Media Builder. If you select to include both the Full and Safe mode versions then both will be included in the ISO file. To burn the ISO file onto a CD you can use Nero or some other burner program.
     
  7. GroverH

    GroverH Registered Member

    Joined:
    May 10, 2006
    Posts:
    2,405
    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    If you're looking for a simplified guide for backups and restoration, check my guides listed below.

    Should you be considering creating a secure zone or startup recovery manager or backup locations, then do a little research first by reviewing those topics as listed in the "Useful Form Threads" link below.
     
  8. craigm6

    craigm6 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Aug 8, 2007
    Posts:
    3
    Thanks for the guides.

    They are very helpful. While I have had some success, there have been too many failures to be comfortable.

    I did one backup of one machine and all went well. Then I loaded Office and decided to do another complete backup to the same device a USB hard drive.

    So I said why don't I backup to a USB memory stick for easy travel, but noticed that the backup was going to be larger than 4 gigs. Went and purchased an 8 gig USB memory stick for backup purposes.

    Home version 10 bombs. Won't write to the USB drive even though Windows XP can see the device. I wouldn't see why Version 10 would could write to a USB hard drive and not a much smaller memory stick?

    I also did a backup of another machine to the USB hard drive and all appears fine, but I noticed that rather than writting one file to the USB hard drive HOME wrote like 10 sequential files. This second machine has been used for several years and I wanted to be able to quickly restore.

    Is the sequential multiple file oberservation common?

    Thanks.
     
  9. thomasjk

    thomasjk Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jul 22, 2005
    Posts:
    1,482
    Location:
    Charlotte NC
    The external USB hard drive is formatted Fat32. The max file size for Fat32 is 4GB so TI automatically breaks the image into 4GB chunks. See this thread for info on backing up to flash drives. https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=173219&highlight=backup+flash+drive
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.