Verification

Hey everyone, new here. I just bought TI Home 2009. I completed backups of my dual boot Vista X64 partitions (hidden) . I boot using GAG. I verified the images running TI from my usb flash. Everything checked out ok. I want to verify by using another HDD to install the images to be absolutly sure. My current HDD is SATA but I only have an IDE drive to test this on right now. Will it make any difference if I test on an IDE drive even though the images are of my system on SATA? I wouldn't think so but I want to be sure. I'll buy another SATA if I absolutly have to. Any help would be appriciated.

Neal

 

Won't matter at all. You are on the right track. The only real verification of a backup is to do a restore.


If you want to be able to boot on the destination drive, you want to do a clone operation, not an image. You can't boot on an image. Be sure you remove the original drive before restarting the machine after a clone. If you boot with both installed, anything can happen, and little of it will be good.

The process tells you when to do this. Do read the dialog boxes before clicing okay.

Have a good day.

 

That's absolutely right.

Whoa! Stop! That's incorrect.

If you make an image of an entire drive (not just the C: partition if there are any other partitions on the drive), you can restore that image to a bare metal brand new drive or to the original drive and it will boot up normally.

This is indeed correct when cloning.

Of course, when you restore an image, normally only one bootable drive will be present, so you don't have this concern.

 

Whoa! Ok, being a bit confused as to the differenece between clone and image, I tried it. I plugged in my IDE drive and restored an image made from my C drive (acually, there are 2 partitions which are each considered C since each is hidden from one another, in reality the one I restored to the IDE drive was from the second partition on the SATA drive). On reboot and setting the BIOS to boot from the IDE drive I was confronted with GAG boot manager which listed my other 2 original SATA partitions. I clicked on them but got a message that they did not exist (which makes sense now). So I added the IDE drive to the boot manager, booted into the IDE and all was perfect! Same as if I booted to the second partition of the SATA drive. So, it seems that I can indeed use an image and restore to a different drive without cloning and it does not need to be an image of the entire drive. I am still confused as to the difference between clone and image but I will read and try to understand.

Neal

 

I'm glad your experiment was successful. Doing restores is a great learning tool.

In the Acronis neighborhood, an image is a copy of a full drive or a single partition saved as a single file (or group of files which must be used together). The file can be opened/mounted with as a virtual drive letter and the contents examined and copied. By itself, the image cannot be booted, but it can be restored to a drive or partition which can be bootable. You can store as many image files on a drive as there is space for them.

Because several images can often be stored on a second drive, imaging is most often used to backup drives.

A clone is a copy of an entire drive to another entire drive. Acronis does not provide for cloning a single partition only entire drives to entire drives. If the original drive was bootable, the clone will be bootable. Since an entire drive is used for the clone, only one copy of the original can exist on a drive no matter how large it is compared to the original.

Cloning is used most often for changing drives. If the original is showing signs of failure or is too small or too slow, it can be cloned to a new, larger or faster drive. The clone then replaces the original drive which can be discarded, erased and reused or stored.

In addition, images can be full, incremental or differential. Once a full image has been made, an incremental backup records only the changes to the drive since the last full or incremental image. Therefore, incremental backups are often much smaller than the full backup. To restore a particular incremental, all the incremental backups made before it back to the original full backup are needed. If any one incremental is missing or damaged, no incremental made afterwards can be restored. Therefore, don't make to many incrementals before doing another full backup and starting the string over.

Differential backups record all the changes since the full backup, so each differential backup is larger than the one before as changes accumulate. However, only one differential and the orginal full backup are needed for a restore.

Clones are a single copy and each clone must be made completely from scratch.

How's that?

 

It is a shame in some ways that a Cloning possibility was ever included in the True image options.

It is something that is suggested as the way to change or upgrade a hard drive.
Consequently it is often employed by new users as they do not realise that they can get the same result by restoring a full drive image to the new replacement drive.

There are many pitfalls that have to be avoided if the Cloning route is taken whereas Restoring a full drive image to a replacement drive is 100% safe.

The key to success, when using either method, is to remove the existing drive from the computer and physically install the new drive in its place. It should be connected in exactly the same way as the old drive.
Only then should the computer be booted from the rescue CD and the process run.
No prior preparation of the new disk is needed. It is all taken care of by True Image.

Xpilot

 

I'm a little confused here, John. If I restore a partition image to a new drive (because my old one crashed), what else must be done to now boot from this new drive?

Or maybe you are just saying that I can't simply locate my image file (wherever I backed it up to) and expect to boot from it.

I, too, am just trying to learn the terminology. Thanks.

 

Thats great John, thanks!. One thing though, by itself, my image was able to boot. I had also unplugged the original drive. I use GAG as a boot manager since I dual boot, this may account for this but now I'm more confused. Since GAG writes itself to the first sector of the physical drive (which I removed), why was it included on the image of my second partition Did TI account for this? Does it have to do with hidden partitions? I'm happy TI included it but I do not understand why.

Neal