Warning! File based backup not capable of restoring Win XP system

Hi,

on my notebook PC I tried to reduce backup duration and archive size from 23 GB to 5 GB by selecting a file based backup from Win XP on NTFS with "My Documents" excluded in place of a partition based backup. That made sense to me, since I use to completely mirror "My Documents" from my tower PC to my notebook PC and I already save "My Documents" from my tower PC. I am very lucky that I had made an additional partition based backup from my notebook PC, before I tested restoring it from the file based backup, after I had prepared its hard disk with a blank NTFS. After restoring, the system seemed to start without problems. But after a little while I discovered many applications running into problems. These applications still rely on the 8.3 file or folder name abbreviations, although a long name is displayed to the user. But Acronis does not save or restore the 8.3 abbreviations. You can check this on Win XP by the command dir /X.

Kind regards
Heiner

 

File and Folder backups are not intended for full system recovery. They are for data backups only. Image backups are for full system backups.

If you want to make a smaller image backup by removing the My Documents folder, you will have to move it to another drive or partition.

 

Hello Heinrich Wolf,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that jmk94903 is correct. File/folder backups were never intended for whole system restoration. Please also see chapter "The difference between file archives and disk/partition images" of the respective User's Guide for more information.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov