Will True Image Workstation Do this ?

Hiya

Unfortunately for me, on sunday, my Dell PC died, one of th two HDD's failed.
Even more unfortunate for me, I had not done a back up !!!!!!!!!!!!

Now I have my replacement HDD installed and I now have an External HDD for back ups, I am looking for some Back up software.

Whilst talking to Dell, they told me to be aware of back up software that may not support Raid 0 (Striping) which is how my pc is set up.

I have 2 x 320GB HDDS in 3 Partitions.

Can and How would I back up my whole system so if I have a catastrophic failure again, I can just rebuild using the image ?

Normally when you do a new build, you have to format your drives into NTFS, does True Image do that for you in a rebuild situation and how does it know how big the partitions should be.

Is Raid 0 worth it ?
It has come to light that if i had done a Check Disk, it may of sorted my problem, but apparently you cant do a check disk in Raid 0, so what are the benefits of Raid 0 and the Negatives of Raid 0 if you dont mind answering ?

Thx for all your help

Paul

 

If its hardware raid. TrueImage will see it as One drive and you can image just like it was one. Restoring is the same.

So no problems.

You can double check this by booting with a restore cd and look if Acronis only sees 1 drive an 3 partitions then your good to go ;-)

 

Thx for the reply

Does true image do the formatting for you auto matically or is that a manual process ??

I am actually going away from the idea that Raid 0 is any good. Seems if i get another drive, Raid 5 might be better or no raid what so ever.
Any thoughts ?

Paul

 

Your probalby won't find a noticeable improvement ins speed using RAID 0, however your are doubling your chances for a disk crash sicne, if either of the disk in the RAID 0 array crash, then the whole logical drive somes down. YOu might consider RAID 1 -- it shouldn't cause any noticeable penalty in speed but will half your risk since, if either hard drive fails, the logical disk will continue in operation.

 

Thank you but can someone explain my Formatting question ?

thx

paul

 

TI will take care of creating and formatting the partitions upon a restore. The target restore drive can be new, empty, wiped or even already contain data and TI will restore the partition structure and format saved in the backup image.

As for the RAID idea... If you move large files around, do video editing, etc. then RAID 0 can improve your performance. For general Windows use, the difference may not be so noticable. While having a RAID 0 setup with two drives does make the chance of failure higher, I look at it like this: If one drive in your RAID 0 fails, you've lost your setup. If you only have a single drive and it fails, you've lost your setup. It only takes one drive to fail either way. All that's increasing are the odds and the way drives are these days a lot of drives arrive DOA or die quickly anyway. So I would look at it strictly from a performance standpoint and make sure to have a backup system in place that works (test the restore and make sure it works). If you do backups to an external drive, network drive or whatever, you may not want to waste the space using RAID 1. RAID 5 performance may be noticably slower depending on the RAID chipset (especially for writing to the drives).

 

Hello paulwilko,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that Acronis True Image 10.0 Home fully supports RAID configurations (including RAID 0,1,5, etc.) from Windows (it uses Windows drivers to access RAIDs), and also while booted from Acronis Bootable Rescue Media. The stanalone version of Acronis True Image uses embedded Linux drivers for RAID arrays.
We recommend you to download and install the free trial version of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home to see how the software works on your computer. With the trial version of the product, you will be able to fully use the product for a period of 15 days. The only limitation of the trial version is that only restore function of the bootable media is available.

As MudCrab explained, Acronis True Image will erase the destination drive/partition (or create partitions if the drive is unformatted) as the first step or image restore, so you don't need to do it manually.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Thank you all

Great answers.

I will install the demo and see how i get on

Thx alot

Paul

 

Okay, everything seems fine.

Another question. I have done something really stupid and formatted a drive with an Acronis back up on it.

I am goign to use a data recovery program but apparently i need to create a Hexadecimal Header for TIB files.

Any idea how i do that ? I know i need Hex Editor but i have no idea what to do with it

Cheers

Paul