Totally confused at this point

I bought Acronis True Image 10 in October and attempted to back up my entire system (which according to Acronis should included not having to re-install software). Shortly thereafter I did the validation check and everything else they suggested with messages back and forth. I wanted to know if the entire system was indeed backed up and why I showed the same thing when I validated 5 times and checked it other ways they suggested. This went on from October until now.

I recently had a new, larger hard drive installed and when I tried to re-install certain programs had no luck. Today I received the following message after sending them a snapshot:

1) Please note that according to the screen shot you have splitted full backup.

When you click on any part of the backup and want to execute any backup/restore/explore/mount operation the product detects the whole backup. That is why you had the same snapshots.

If you created the full backup of system partition/disk then all data is backed up.

2) Please note that you can not restore the separate applications from the image since the applications usually change the registry during the installation. You can restore the applications only restoring the whole image of the system partition/disk.

First off, I did the my computer backup as instructed in the manual. So why do I have split backup and what does that mean? If understand the second paragraph correctly, I can't restore individual files/programs because of the split backup.

I'm totally confused at this point and all I want to do is get certain programs/files from the old drive and put them on the new drive. There is an application called my data backup. Should I have used that?

I have the old drive installed in a case and can do whatever backup I need to do from that.

I really appreciate any help and guidance. I do have and did read the manual that I downloaded.

Thanks

 

Your post isn't entirely clear to me but:

Your backup will be split if: You have a split-size selected in the options that is smaller than the entire backup archive. Also, you can get automatic splitting if the disk you are storing the archive on is formatted FAT32 which for external USBs as bought, is typical. In the FAT32 case, if your archive is over around 4GB you will see 1 or more 4GB tib files and then a smaller final tib file.

Having split archives is not a problem but to mount and extract files they entire archive has to be in the same folder. TI will see the various tib files from a split archive as exactly that and knows it needs the rest of them to complete the archive.

You can restore individual files from a image but you cannot selectively restore applications. They way to get your applications back is to restore the entire image which means all of them.

Hope this sheds a bit of light on your situation.

 

seekforever:

O.K. I'm still more than a bit confused. When I open the TI file on the removable drive I get the following:

Using the recovery under archive selection I get: WD(L) My book under that a folder WD-Windows_Tools under that mybackup1.tib through mybackup5.ti

Using my computer, double clicking K (removable drive) backups 1,2,3,and 4 all show 4,194,304 kb and backup 5 is 1,824,100Kb.

On the right side I get 17.7gb in the description area; under mybackup1.tib under the picture of the drive I get 74.53gb; under disk 1 next to that is HP-Recovery (D): Fat 32 4.794gb
Next to that is HP-Pavillion (C): NTFS 69.73 gb

This is all using the TI recovery.

Is this the way it should read or am I not doing this correctly?

Thanks
Steve

 

secsteve,
The information you provided in post #3 appears to be normal. You show a TI backup file to be 17.7gb and that is comprised of 5 files. Since the backup set is comprised of file sizes of 4,194,304kb, this indicates your storage volume is a FAT32 drive. This is perfectly normal.

As for restoring your programs on a selective basis, this is simply not possible. It's either all or none. If a single or several programs become all screwed up, you cannot restore them individually or as a group. Program install is integrated too much into the registry to be able to do a single or dual program restore.

Your best opiton is to have created a current backup image (archive) of your entire drive. Then, you can restore the entire image and your entire drive will be back the same as when the backup was created. If you have multiple partitons on your system drive, then I suggest you have a backup of the entire disk where the "disk" is ticked under backup type selection.

Perhaps you would find it helpful to review my backup and restore guides listed below in my signature.

 

And restoring a disk/partition image is oftern quicker than installing or repair installing a program!

Btw, as Grover pointed out, disks formated as FAT disks can't have files larger than a nomimal 4GB. ATI automatically adapts for this by splitting backups being mad eto FAT disks into appropriately sized chunks.

Unless you neeed to use these disk on a machine that can only read FAT disks, it's a good idea to change the format to NTFS. NTFS is more secure file system than any of the FAT versions because NTFS is a journaling file system.

For XP, the Microsoft instructions to convert from FAT to NTFS are here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881

 

Hi secsteve,

What is your operating system and version you are using? Did you read about setting up the options for Backing up and Restoring in the Acronis Manual?

Are you backing up an entire Hard Drive, or just the operating system partition? Sometimes you want to burn a copy of the operating system image to a DVD-R or DVD-RW Disk, if a failure of the Hard Drive should occur. It is occurs, after installing the operating system from scratch onto a new Hard Drive, you would use Acronis to restore from a DVD.

However, you can't restore a single program from an image file, you need to reinstall the program. And you can't restore from a Data Backup either, a program. You can however, restore DATA files from a DATA Backup file.

 

Thank you Grover H and Thecreator for your help.

When I bought ATI the guy at Best Buy assured me that you could fully restore programs from ATI after doing a backup. Obviously a. He didn't know what he was talking about and b. I shouldn't believe everything the Geek squad tells me.

Since I now have the new hard drive, I'm taking your advice Grover and doing the backup as you suggersted. My question here is will it again break the files into 5 different parts on the new, removable hard drive? I read the information about FAT etc. and it was a bit confusing for me. I'm computer literate enough to be dangerous and even though it sounds easy enough, I don't think I want to do that.

My operating system is Win XP with Service Pack 2. Yes I read about the options for Backing Up and restoring, but didn't fully understand obviously.

I would be backing up the entire Hard Drive Creator. I have the operating system disks, since I bought a copy of Win XP to install on the new drive. The old one was pre-installed by HP and I had to make recovery disks.

I will be doing (and have done so in the past after learning the hard way) full backups of my data files so I won't lose anything there.

Once again, many, many thanks for your help and advice.

Steve

 

I don't know of any program which would allow you to restore a single program. A program install involves the registry and more. You can restore you entire drive but not a single program. You can restore personal data folders or files--just not programs.

Format the external drive as an NTFS system and it will not split files. It is the drive receiving the backup file which controls whether file is split. NTFS will not split whereas FAT32 will split a 4GB. Acronis True Image has an option called "archive splitting" should you want to control the size of the backup file.

Reminder: the external backup drive only connected when in actual use--not 24/7, etc. For security, it is always recommended that you store your backup files in multiple devices so not all your eggs are in one basket--as is often said. Even supplemental storage on some files on DVD can be helpful.