Storage Solutions Question on restoring Acronis TrueImage disk images

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sydras

Skilled
I'm looking for a software that can backup my HDD's boot sector, the windows and program files directories and should be able to restore it back to the disk in the event of a Win XP crash.

Now, I've been reading that Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage are the two popular disk imaging applications that can be used to get the job done. I've known Ghost for years and have even made backup disk images though I never tested or restored them it as I never had the cash to buy another hard disk to restore the image to. But recent reviews I've been reading all point to TrueImage being the the application of choice to do this important activity.

I do not want to rely on any other unproven application as the image will be used in a time of despair and I don't want to be a guinea pig for some shoddy recovery utility :p .

But my question about Acronis is, can I restore the image to a disk or partition without losing existing data on that partition? AFAIK, with Ghost, all partition/disk information will be lost. Is is the same with TrueImage? And why is it so? Logically, restoring an image to me only requires a boot sector restore, along with recovery of the WinXP and Program files directories. Or am I missing something else here?
 
sydras said:
my question about Acronis is, can I restore the image to a disk or partition without losing existing data on that partition?
Click to expand...

I use Acronis True Image a lot and back up my Windows setup partition daily and for various reasons I restore an image at least once a week.

You can restore an image to make a mirror of the original in which case all data on the partition where you restore will be lost, because whilst restoring an image Acronis formats/wipes clean the partition, but Acronis also allows you to Restore "selected" files or directories to any location of your choice - this is like doing a file/directory copy, in this case old data remains intact and the new is added. I use this feature often when I have deleted a file by mistake. With this method of selective restore you could in fact select all the files from an image and restore the whole lot to an existing partition without loosing any data already present in the partition - but this will not make the partition bootable in case the image has the OS.
 
@linuxtechie, I checked the Acronis website. No such information on the same.

@Eazy, thanks a lot for the clarification and the two types of restore i.e. partition restore and file/folder restore. I've been searching online for quite a bit now for this simple answer.

It seems that the FAT(or NTFS file structure....I don't know if it is called FAT in the case of NTFS) is also re-written in case of a partition restore so the old folder/directory structure is no longer valid. Whether the image is a bootable one or not does not matter.

Looks like the boot sector and the FAT both are re-written in case of a bootable image and only the FAT is re-written in case of a non-bootable image. In either case, the data on the destination partition/disk cannot be recovered.
 
sydras said:
two types of restore i.e. partition restore and file/folder restore.
Click to expand...

You can do the file/folder restore from the option near the bottom "Explore and validate Backup Archives", this opens a window like Windows Explorer.

 
sydras said:
which version of Acronis TrueImage do you use? And which versions do you recommend/not recommend?
Click to expand...

I now use Home version 10.0 (build 4,871) - this is very good, before this I used for long Enterprise Server v8.1.941 which I found very good. Some of the 9.xx versions gave me trouble so I skipped them and went from the 8.x to the 10.x

I dont think I will upgrade again unless my current one gives me problems with future HDDs.
 
Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1 & True Image Eco Workstation works good for me... Lets me directly burn the image to DVD-R/+R....

I've recovered many times the Windows partition 'coz natively my mobo does not support SATA drives while Accronis does & it hardly takes 5 mins... So windows installation is a breeze...

The latest version also support Blu-Ray direct writing in case you get those for huge backup's... No problem what so ever with image restoration....
 
Since this is an Acronis TI thread, a query:- :)

Can TI recovery disc make whole disk backups and save the images to an external hard drive? Does TI recovery disc recognize external hard drives?

I have TI 10.
 
To answer the original ? You can restore files and directories from within the backed up partition image, or you can restore it to another position on the current hdd or a different hdd.

Yes TI does recognize external hdd's, this is what I use for my own image backups. Yes TI can backup a whole hdd instead of a single partition.
 
I think save to and recovery from external hard drive might be supported after a particular version of TrueImage. Eazy might know something on this or else you might have to google a bit to find out from which version onwards, this support exists.
 
well i work for symantec and let me tell you that there are major issues with GHOST... the amount of R&D i do on the recovery procedure is insane!!!! Acronis is good, but how about for Vista back up and restore, the problem with these restore softwares is that the boot record gets messed up most of the time...
 
^^When was Ghost last updated? Symantec doesn't provide it as part of its corporate offerings (there they offer backup exec), which leads me to believe they don't really care about it.
 
Didn't I mention this in my last post :bleh: the new version of Acronis TrueImage will work with an external hdd just fine, so will the last version too...

I have been doing this with Acronis for ages.
 
I made an image of my system partition using seagate diskwizard which uses acronis technology. Can i restore this image to a different & larger size hdd if later this drive stops working?
 
I think you can. But you'll lose any data on the new HDD partition that you will be restoring to(the partition can be of any size btw).
 
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