Thank you to everyone who helped my

After procrastinating for over a week, I finally reformatted my 160gb WD external to NTFS this morning and did a full back using Acronis TI 10. The whole process went very smoothly and valadation was successful.

Grover, your beginner instructions that I printed and followed were very helpful. The full backup used 9GB.

I sincerely appreciate everyone's efforts in helping me to understand the process.

Grover, being new to backing up, I still do not understand what No. 6 in your Beginners Guide to backing up means, "Re-boot using the TI Rescue CD". Does re-boot mean to insert the rescue CD I made into my CD/DVD drive and run the backup from that drive when it powers up? I did not do that. I ran the backup from Acronis software that is installed on my laptop. The term re-boot is confusing to me.

The support and help on this forum is awesome. Thanks.

Bev

 

Yes, that's what it means. And the reason for this is that in case of a hard drive failure, the Rescue CD will be your only way of running True Image to recover the backup that is on the external drive to the replacement drive that you would then have in the laptop.

In fact you should actually get a second laptop drive to test this. I know ... it will cost money, but it will give you peace of mind to know that the backup will work when it comes to crunch time.

And you can always buy an external case for that second drive to use as an external in the mean time.

 

So is the backup that I ran from Acronis software and located on my WD external hard drive good? Will the Acronis rescue CD that I created be able to mate up with the backup on my external HD and recover to a new internal HD on my laptop should I need to do this? If yes, why would I need a second external HD? I do have another WD 500gb but I do not want to dedicate it to backups.

Thank you Down.

Bev

 

The point he is making is that there is no way of knowing it will work unless it is tested and the way to do that is to put in a different drive unless you are prepared to reload your system from scratch if it doesn't restore.

The next best way without actually doing the restore is to create the rescue CD and boot your machine with it.

Select the Full option and then navigate to your archive on the external drive.

Validate the archive.

If it validates with the CD, then go through the Restore wizard right up to the screen where you have to click Proceed to do the restore (at least called this in TI9). Cancel out without doing the restore.

This is as good a test as you can do without actually restoring. Most of the restore problems with TI not caused by hardware is due to the incompatibility of the Linux environment used on the recovery CD. By booting the CD, running the TI Linux version to do the validate and running through the restore wizard up to the restore command is a fairly good test - but not as good as a real restore.

You don't need the second external I think he was giving a use for it after it was used for testing.

 

Your first backup was of the full disk type which included all partitions. (Am I correct?). Now for additional security, bootup using the Rescue CD and perform a backup of the C system partition only. (tick mark C). Set your backup options so that validates runs automatically from within the CD. This would be good practice and additional security.

Was the backup created as one large file or many smaller files?

What burning software do you use on your computer? Roxio or Nero, etc?

 

Grover,

1st backup was of all partitions. I had formatted the EHD to NTFS

Backup was one large file with tree structure as follows select My Book E from My Computer.

My Book E
Acronis-sept4
(TI icon) full Sept 4 size 9,213,095kb type Acronis True Image

Laptop only has Roxio. Laptop HD is 80gb with 61gb available for use. I like to keep my hard drive clean and copy photos to DVD as soon as they accumulte.

I sure miss the old complete tree display of files from years back. I will insert the Rescue CD and do a "C: backup from it in D drive. This makes me nervous.

Bev

 

I, too, prefer the file view. Open Explorer and Change the View option at the top. Change to Details or List. Sample below--is this what you mean?

 

Yes, I know about view/details. No, I am refering to the very old file structure where it began with root and the entire computer file structure followed indented relative to what files were stored where.

Grover, I must admit that I really do not how to use the Rescue CD. I put it in my D drive and did not know what to do from there. I looked at the files and had no clue how to access Acronis TI from that CD. The size of the file on the Rescue CD is almost 47.6 mb. Sorry to be such a dumbie.

 

Don't be uneasy. You can do it!
Insert your True Image Rescue CD. Close tray and then do a normal Shut Down.
Your system should bootup from the CD--(not your normals Windows screen)
Choose the Full version option
The system will be busy loading for couple minutes and then the main True Image menu should appear. It will appear almost identical to the Windows version.

Choose The Backup Option. and follow the guides to Backup Guides to screen B4, tick mark only the System partition (Drive C).

You can follow the guides and also get your feet wet by choosing the "archive splitting" option (screen B and type the size of 1492 mb.

Choose the validate option (screen B9)

also assign a password to your backup as listed under the "archive protection" option.

When backup & validation completed, your new backup folder should show total about 7 GB broken into approx 4-5 files as approximately identified by the sample below.

 

Ok one last thing. I did put the rescue CD in, opened the file and clicked on one of the files. I hope I did not do any damage. I have never rebooted from a rescue disk before. Thank you for the steps you privided. I will execute them later this afternoon.

 

photogeniie,
Can you share an update with us. What were your results?