Where does TI mostly fail ?

I'm fairly new to TI and have had no problem in making an image (tho' at one point had to return to earlier version to successfully read it properly)

So assuming a good recovery cd has been made and that I can successfully read my saved image (on an External Western drive) and it is verified.

Should I now feel able to sit back and feel confident that I can restore this image without problem - or is there still room for failure ?

If so where might I expect TI may still fail and which additional preparations should I make ?

Question assumes that no hardware is corrupted and the re-install was OS failure/corruption led.

Thanks for any guidance

 

Hello eyes-open,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that the Check Image tool was specially designed to check the image archive integrity in order to be sure that the image is not corrupted.

This means that if you have successfully verified your image archive by means of the Check Image tool then there should not be any problems restoring this image.

There is no need to perform any additional verifications or tests in this case.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

You have done all that is necessary as long as the image you made was of the entire boot hard drive (all partitions) and you verified the image after booting from the TrueImage recovery CD.

If your boot drive fails completely for any cause, you can install a new bare, unformatted, unpartitioned hard drive and restore the full image to it to be back up and running in a few minutes. If the failure is due to a virus, spyware, bad installation of new hardware or software, you can restore the image and be back in business even faster.

 

Right, well that's great guys.

To be honest the reason I asked is that it all seemed so easy I figured there must still be something I hadn't anticipated, so I thought I'd double-check.

Perhaps its the external drive aspect that makes everything that little easier ?

Anyway thanks for replying

 

What you have sounds fine. I have been using True Image for 2 years now, and no real problems here.

You might want to think about the following things to improve your setup. I will include as many as I can think of, though I'm sure others could add to this list. However, these things are not to do with TrueImage particularly, but general backup good practise.

So my list of extra steps to consider:-

1) (IMPORTANT) You will want to think about where you keep your external drive. If you store it attached to your machine, then a power surge might blow the machine and the drive or a virus might attack them both. Even if you leave the drive unplugged, if you leave it near the machine and you had a theft, then you might again lose both the drive and the machine.

2) (FAILRLY IMPORTANT) You will probably want multiple backups stored on your external drive, taken over several weeks/days at any one point in time, so that you are not dependant on any one backup.

3) (OPTIONAL) If you are really paranoid and want to be absolutely sure your backup will work, then you might want to try a restore onto a spare (sacrificial) Hard disk. Then you will KNOW that it works, before it is too late. However it all sounds fine.

4) (OPTIONAL) If it is a really important machine/data, then you might want to increase the number of copies of the image you keep, because if your external drive went belly-up and you didn't know that it had, then you might have lost the image you were relying upon. If you had a spare copy for example on CDs or DVDs then this would give you further peace of mind. This can also help with "Offsite backup storage" if you stored them elsewhere, as you might lose everything if you had fire at your home for example.

For the majority of home users, an external disk backup of the full drive image is FAR more than most users have, and will see them through the majority of disasters that they could imagine. It would be very unlucky to lose access to the external drive and your machine together. The more crucial the data, the more "redundancy" you want in the backup methods in case one of them fails.

With any "backup system" you are assessing the risks, and likelyhood of occurance, and weighing them up against the cost and hassle of implematation... you need to find your own balance point that you are happy with.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[edited to correct spelling]

 

@ xpcomputers

Mike, that is a great list, really well presented. I think I have most of my bases covered, but it's always good to be encouraged to double check.

Thanks for a really well thought out posting.


http://members.shaw.ca/wenpigsfly/smileys/thumb.gif

 

Hi Mike,

Indeed that's an excellent list that covers essentials without scare tactics.

Now, how do we get the average user to make even one backup?