Question re Acronis TI v10 Home and Win x64

I recently upgraded to a PC running Windows XP pro x64 version (64 bit). Yesterday I purchased Acronis TI Home v 10 since it is compatible with this operating system. Everything seems to be working fine – the program successfully made and verified image files of all my drives, and also made a bootable CD that works. I was able to selectively restore test data files, so the backup archives look to be good. I backup onto IDE drives in Vantec removable drive caddies, and I’m happy with how fast TI 10 is on this setup (much faster than my old setup.)

One thing has me wondering, though…. The program installed in the ‘program files(x86)’ folder, which under Win X64 is where 32 bit applications go. I’m not a techie, but I thought that the whole problem with drivers, backup software, anti-virus software, and other system tools on x64 is that they needed to be native 64 bit Windows programs. Again – not being all that technical – I thought that a 32 bit app running in 32 bit emulation mode couldn’t perform certain tasks because its sitting in a virtual machine “on top” of Win64.

Short of wiping my hard drive an attempting a restore, I don’t know how I can test the backup further. It’s conceivable that a 32 bit app running in a virtual 32 bit machine might think everything is fine, when in fact its not.

So… to get to the point: Should Acronis TI Home v 10, installed on a Winodws x64 setup, be in the program files(x86) directory, or should it be installed as a native 64 bit app?

Thanks in advance –

Mark C.

 

Hello Mark C.

What caught my eye in your post is that you use removable drive caddies to store your images.

If you change your physical set up so your main drive is in a caddy and you one more in another caddy you could use it thus :-

Make a complete image to an internal slave drive. Take out the main drive and replace it with the " spare" now do a complete restore.

Now what you have are generations of images on the slave drive which have been proved by doing actual restores. You also will have the ultimate backup which is a working hard drive that was removed from the computer after the last image was made ( I actually have three caddies so have two generations of main drives available at any time).

You are already using the most efficient and fastest method by exclusively using internal drives.
My method saves even more time as you will see running image validations is no longer necessary.

Any real main drive breakdown is cured by popping in another one which is known to be perfect. This only takes the time to shut down and re-boot.


Xpilot

 

With the newer eSata external drives, you can have the best of both worlds - fast backup and the drive external - so if the PC power supply goes pop, your drive has less chance of being 'popped' as well. I don't know yet whether TI will work with eSata - though I don't see why it shouldn't.


Colin

 

One can already get racks and caddies that will take SATA drives.
My logic says that if the power supply goes pop and one loses all the images the most important bits, the backup main drives, are safe outside the computer and only one is ever connected at any one time.

Of course if several generations of images are vital the slave drives could also be in caddies.
I did consider this when setting up my system but decided that two generations of actual working hard drives is more than enough for my purposes.

FWIW I also use the backup slave drive for the Windows page file. This never needs defragging and helps efficiency. I have simulated failure of this drive and Windows carries on OK . It just creates a page file at the root of the boot drive automatically with no sweat.

Xpilot

 

Thanks - I hadn't thought about that. It would be pretty simple to backup just the bootable partition onto another internal drive, pull the plug on the main drive, and then attempt to restore the main partition to one of the drives in the Vantec caddy. That would certainly give the whole process a thorough testing, since I would be booting off the CD etc.

The drives in the caddies do work very well. When I first went to this setup I had two drives in two caddies, and just made clones of the two drives in the PC I had at the time. In theory, if the PC lost a drive I could of just popped in one of the caddies and picked up where I left off.

In practice, when the motherboard finally fried I upgraded to a new system, including Windows x64, so I had to re-install everything and migrate all my info to the new PC. I suppose that if I had stuck with regular Windows 32 bit I could of tried a repair install from the clone drives of the old system into the new, but think a clean install was probably worth the time and effort. On the plus side - I experinced virtually no data loss (a few application macros were too well hidden for me to find, but that was it.)

Now the new system is running on SATA drives and has a lot more storage space (400 gigs) so I'm using the two IDE drives in the caddies just as backup devices, which Acronis seems to do a good job with.

- MarkC.