HD backup with Acronis True Image for WD

[Muse]

Never used True Image, have used Ghost a lot, quite some time ago, got out of the habit of using it. Ghost (2003) was very easy and intuitive, and maybe I should use it now, but that software is almost 10 years old and I figure I should maybe use Acronis True Image instead, I've heard really good things about it.

I just fired up ATI for the first time (I'm using the Western Digital edition, which I can do because either of these is true: the HD to be backed up is WD / the backup HD is WD, in my case both are true). What's got me confused is that ATI asks me if I want to actually delete all information on the target drive. Of course I do not. It's my data drive, a 2TB USB connected drive, has tons of important data. The PC it's attached to is a laptop with a 320GB HD with Windows XP and very little data, a few apps installed. I just want to be able to restore things if the laptop gets corrupted or something, so I'd like to make a backup to the 2TB external drive. Ghost lets you do this easily. Can't I do this with Acronis TI? Poking around I don't see any way to do it without deleting all the data on the backed-up-to HD!

I figure I can do it with Ghost 2003. However, I want to do something similar with another laptop, a Windows 7 64 bit which has a hidden boot partition. I'm thinking that Ghost may not do this and that I should use ATI. What are my options?

 

[corkyg]

Create a partition on the external drive so that it is a lettered drive. You can then back up to that drive w/o damaging the other data you have. Windows 7 can create that partition for you. It is then, in effect, a separate drive as far as Acronis is concerned.

 

[Muse]

Create a partition on the external drive so that it is a lettered drive. You can then back up to that drive w/o damaging the other data you have. Windows 7 can create that partition for you. It is then, in effect, a separate drive as far as Acronis is concerned.

I can certainly do that, but is it necessary? With Ghost you can just put the backup anywhere, AFAIK. It creates a series of files with .gho extensions. You're basically saying I have to have a partition to write to that has nothing on it I don't want to lose with Acronis.

 

[corkyg]

It applies to cloning, i.e., drive imaging. A straight back up which is useleff unbless restored, should go anywhere. It is a proprietary file. Be careful as to what you are asking Acronis to do.

 

[radhak]

I used Acronis (whatever version) till a couple of years ago, and it was alway iffy. It has great interface, but the robustness of backup vital to such a software is missing. You have to backup just so, then to just such-and-such place, and still the restore may not work.

At crunch time - XP HDD crashed and I had to restore the backup, and TI totally failed me. One backup had 'errors', and another went thru the whole restore but would not boot (went into infinite loop). So just washed my hands off it and walked away. (And yes, I too recall running into the same problem as you did, and being surprised they don't offer a better solution).

So many others seem to do a better (dependable) job : Macrium Reflect and Paragon allow a complete disc image for free (the paid versions also allow selective files/folders). Try them out.

 

[Muse]

Thanks, Radhak. In backing up my Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate with its hidden partition, I think I should try one of those. For my XP laptop, I think I can get away with using my Ghost 2003. I'm going to give it a try, fingers crossed. It's a little scary, cause you don't know for sure if it will work until you try it and if you test, you might find that you've just wiped your HD and you're starting over! I've had great luck with Ghost, though. Can't remember it failing me. Beautiful program, intuitive and very simple. It's owned by Symantec last time I checked. However, it was developed by some people down in Australia or New Zealand, I think maybe a couple of guys. They sold it to Symantec, who IMO are incapable of developing such a beautiful, functional and intuitive program. I'm concerned that it may not work for my Windows 7 machine, though. I guess I could try, the machine is in a pretty rudimentary state at the moment, which is why I want to back it up now, before things get complicated.

 

[sm625]

Acronis is capable of taking an image of your system drive and storing that image as a file wherever you want, be it a HDD, a thumb drive, or even a network share. If you cannot get it to do that then you are not picking the correct options.

 

[Muse]

Acronis is capable of taking an image of your system drive and storing that image as a file wherever you want, be it a HDD, a thumb drive, or even a network share. If you cannot get it to do that then you are not picking the correct options.

I figured, but I did poke around a bunch. I have the manual printed out, something like 100 pages, not a 5 minute read! Ghost is so intuitive, I don't need a manual to use it. I just tried backing up one of my XP laptops. Ghost saw my 2TB USB external HD, marked it as usable, with my confirmation. But when it came to making a file image of the laptop's unpartitioned (except for the hidden partition) HD, it didn't present the 2TB drive as an option to write to for some reason. So, I removed the 2TB drive and replaced it with my 500GB external USB HD and Ghost seems to like that well enough and the backup is proceeding as I type.

AFAIK, Ghost had no problems writing to the same 2TB HD in the past, I see some backups I made there a couple of years ago.

 

[bruceb]

May not apply to Acronis, but when I use Ghost, I create a folder for where the Ghost Image goes. You should do the same for Acronis and as long as you are just creating a Backup Image and not doing a Clone, it will put the image in that folder when you point the program to it.

 

[Revolution 11]

I remember using Ghost back in 2003 and earlier. A excellent backup program for its time although Symantec has let the brand rot beyond belief.

Muse, you are not using Acronis correctly I think. As corkyg points out, there is making a backup image of your drive/files vs. cloning that drive. The former is not destructive of any drive and just creates a single file. The latter is destructive and will wipe all former contents. You can point to a backup image file with Acronis's Restore Wizard and follow the instructions to restore your files/drive.

For entire drive backups, you can validate a backup file using the Wizard to check for errors. Also, use normal compression as recommended as no compression means very large file sizes and extreme compression makes me nervous.

I am not sure which version of True Image you tried but I am using True Image 11.0 from 2007 and it is rock-solid stable on Windows XP. The newer versions should be good for Win 7. Hope this helps.

 

[Muse]

May not apply to Acronis, but when I use Ghost, I create a folder for where the Ghost Image goes. You should do the same for Acronis and as long as you are just creating a Backup Image and not doing a Clone, it will put the image in that folder when you point the program to it.

Do you have to do that from a bootable medium (e.g. a CD, which is what I do with Ghost) or can you do this when you run Acronis within Windows? I was running Acronis within Windows, which may have been my problem.

 

[Charlie98]

May not apply to Acronis, but when I use Ghost, I create a folder for where the Ghost Image goes. You should do the same for Acronis and as long as you are just creating a Backup Image and not doing a Clone, it will put the image in that folder when you point the program to it.

That's what I do... I have a folder set up on my Seagate GoFlex external drive my Acronis images go to... and they are big. The backup I made this morning was 107GB. I have never tried to recover with one of these backups, though (in fact, I've only been using it for about 2 months.)

It did gag when I tried to copy the image from my external drive to my D drive (storage HDD with some system files on it; ) it failed to copy. I'm guessing it has an issue with having the backup on the same drive as some of it's image.

 

[Muse]

Today I restored a Ghost backup of my OS_APPS drive (the C drive) on my T61 Win7 64bit Ultimate laptop. I made the backup end of December 2010. I only discovered it today, on a drive I no longer regularly use, a 500GB Cavalry USB external. My Ghost CD could see my 2TB external drive, but it would not write to it. There was a rudimentary install of Windows 7 on the machine and I wanted to install the Ghost image from Dec. 2010. I Ghosted the machine in case the restore failed, to the Cavalry 500GB drive, because Ghost would not write an image to the 2TB HD.

The restore did fail, but Windows said I should insert the installation disk and do a repair. I did this and Windows 7 (from the restore) seems fine now. I have a much more full featured installation without having to go through a whole bunch of installations and configurations, thankfully. There's more to do, but I've cut the process way down using the backup/restore process.

I was worried it wouldn't work because the installation I ghosted about 1.5 years ago was of a Windows 7 installation that wasn't the default, which has a 100MB boot partition. I did the hack eliminating that. The installation I did a couple of months ago was the default, so I didn't know how the restore would go inasmuch as the extra partition was there on the disk. What does seem strange is that prior to the restore, my partitioning of the 640GB HD was about 150GB for the boot_apps partition and the rest is a data partition. Now, the boot_apps partition is more like 125GB. Don't know why the big discrepancy! Before I did the restore today the C drive had about 19% higher capacity.

Edit: Whoops, looks like my D drive is missing, my data partition! Well, it was basically completely empty. I'll have to get it up and running again. Disk Management says there's 472GB unallocated space.

 

[Revolution 11]

I have always used Acronis's restore function after a OS is re-installed on the disk drive so I am not sure if you can boot from the restore file itself. Acronis should be able to restore from within Windows but I don't know if you need two partititions for that (one for host OS, one to place your restored image on). Non-OS restores that only involve data files should work fine within Windows within a single partition.