Acronios True Image

[HRMaddie]

So I received Acronis True Image 9.0 in the mail today and was going to clone my C: drive to an external drive, for backup purposes. When I was clicking through the little wizard (Disk Clone Mode), Acronis states in Automatic mode - "Note that you have to remove the old hard disk when data moving is completed". Are they serious? I don't want to rip out my current C: drive, it is working fine. What am I missing here? I just want to create a complete clone of my C:, in case of hard drive failure.

[budz]

Interesting that you posted a question regarding Acronios True Image because I've been debating whether or not to buy the software. I'm sure other members will help you out with your question.

[BobK]

I don't have True Image 9.0, but I've been using version 6, 7 and currently 8. Assuming that 9 is similar to version 8 then you're clicking on the wrong icon. The Disk Clone button is listed in the New Disk Deployment section. If you were installing a new disk and wanted it to replace your old drive then you'd want to use the New Disk Deployment section and it reminds you that you'll have to remove the old drive since you're deploying a new one.

Since you're backing up your drive and not deploying a new disk you should click on the 'Create Image' icon in the Disk Imaging section. Once you've created an image you can later restore that image back to the same drive or to a different drive.

The difference is that when you clone your drive to install a new one, it copies your old drive exactly to the new one (and that means it will take exactly as much space on the new drive as it does on the old one). When you create an image for backup, it compresses the data so it takes up much less room than an uncompressed clone.

Of course you could still use the Disk Clone to make a backup to an external drive and keep the external drive for backup. Just ignore the part that says you'll have to remove the old drive.

I've been using True Image for almost 4 years and it's saved me a lot of time and trouble. At least once a month I make an image of my current boot drive as a backup.

[Seeker47]

So I received Acronis True Image 9.0 in the mail today and was going to clone my C: drive to an external drive, for backup purposes. When I was clicking through the little wizard (Disk Clone Mode), Acronis states in Automatic mode - "Note that you have to remove the old hard disk when data moving is completed". Are they serious? I don't want to rip out my current C: drive, it is working fine. What am I missing here? I just want to create a complete clone of my C:, in case of hard drive failure.

I believe the version being sold right now is 10, and that it incorporates another Acronis product, Migrate Easy. The latter is supposed to let you do a complete OS ++ migration to another drive, such as a considerably larger drive, with the ability to adjust partition sizes accordingly along the way. Their Tech Support told me that this should work even with a multi-OS, multi-partition drive -- and not necessarily from the same drive type / manufacturer. Everything you have should continue to boot as before. This strikes me as a lofty challenge (having previously tried to do this manually, with tools like Partition Magic 8, and failing), so I'm naturally a bit skeptical. If anyone has reports re True Image 10 with Migrate Easy and a similar task, I'd be interested to hear about your results.

[Bjs]

I still prefer drive image and partition commander ... work's well with sata backup from dos .
If drive screw's up , I'm backup and running in under 12 minute's from a dvd image or multiple cd set ... no mater what os is being used .

I have tested many of these tool's on so called "your drive is about to chuck it in" warning on many different hd's and brand's ... most of the commercial tool's will choke .

The only tool's that really do the job are the 2 I listed above , and the manufacturer's clone tool's .

In one test , drive image complained about double file sector's after 3/4's of an hour and failed ... I used the western digital drive clone tool's to transfer to another drive ... 80 gig drive took over 3 hour's ... 1 am in the morning , all was well once more ... this was a call out service in another town ... I got back into bed at 3.20am after driving back .

The replacement drive was a western digital ... but I was reading from a maxtor unit ... so as you can see , these manufacturer's tool's are reasonably compatable across unit's ... provided atleast 1 drive is their's .

I looked at a few of these other tool's before , but didnt like some of the feature's mentioned , or requirement's ... such as norton's ghost for xp only ... I kept my older version of that tool ... some of the other tool's had issue's with portable media , report's from user's in forum's ... which should be rectified well before now .

From your side ... your accesing a feature that not only clone's the drive , but set's the new drive as active , and the old drive as non-active ... so as not to cause issue with having two active os partitioned drive's installed within the system ... that's what is going too happen and why you would need to swap the cable's atleast , around inside the pc .

[fatbloke88]

Hi
create the acronis secure zone the same size as the drive you want to clone on your external drive using manage acronis secure zone and follow the wizard, that way you won't overwrite the backup by accident.Then select backup/next/the entire disk contents or individual partition. now put a tick in the check box for the drive you want to backup and hit next,click ok for the information popup. now selectacronis secure zone in the left hand window and hit next,if its your first backup select create new full backup and hit next.Here you can either select use default options or set options manually(i usually hit this one and choose no compression)then next and it allows you to type a comment for the backup,hit next when done now check whether the right drives are selected and press proceed.When its done check the archive to make sure there are no errors.
Now create a bootable media disk and put someware safe if the pc won't boot shove in the disk and boot up true image ,navigate to your backup and run it.
hope this helps

[fatbloke88]

Budz Ive used acronis true image for about 2 years now,I create a partition for windows of about 30 gb with all programs installed,move my documents onto the next partion that way if i fail to boot i can be up and running in twenty minutes unless its a mechanical failure.
and its great cos every time my parents sod up the computer i built for them i can fix it in no time.

[Seeker47]

Budz Ive used acronis true image for about 2 years now,I create a partition for windows of about 30 gb with all programs installed,move my documents onto the next partion that way if i fail to boot i can be up and running in twenty minutes unless its a mechanical failure.
and its great cos every time my parents sod up the computer i built for them i can fix it in no time.

And that's why I still want to know just how far you can count on Migrate Easy, their other product that is now incorporated into Acronis True Image 10: if the HDD itself fails, it won't matter what else you've squirreled away on that drive, or what images you've stored elsewhere. Can the boot partition go onto a different (and larger) replacement drive, and still work ? Can you change the partition location or drive letter on the replacement drive ? Acronis tech support claims that you can, but I'd like to confirm that.

I don't know enough about the inner workings of Windows, but I think that MS has taken some steps to make this extra difficult . . . because they don't want you to be able to move everything to a new hard drive and have it continue working. There are partition IDs, unique hard drive IDs, and maybe hard-coded sector location info -- or even something else ? -- that results in boot failures after the migration attempt. I have seen plenty of these failures myself, I just don't have a handle on the mechanism that is involved. (And I have successfully relocated other OSes, without such roadblocks getting in the way, using other tools. But nothing seemed to work for a 2K or XP boot partition.) If Acronis has indeed managed to overcome this, then their product becomes a must-have for me.

[bigstusexy]

Seeker47, Calm down there are no smoke and mirros or tricky little things involved. THe only that that might come into play is activation and if you are moving from one drive to another but in the same system there will be no activation problems.


MS has done nothing to stop this, I do it everyday and everytime something dies. We have many Dell PCs under warrenty here at my job and there are many that die or almost die and if I can get the contents before they die, or if I want to be quick and bring back another computer quickly I clone from one drive to another and it always starts up fine.


Things to remember.
1. ARC statments, if you don't know what it is, head to MSes site and read up on it.
2. Partitions BEFORE your system partion
3. System and Boot Partion need not be the same
4. Boot Sector.


1 and 2 are related, 3 you don't have to deal with much and 4 is easy.


For everyone:
The purpose of making a backup image is not use while your drive is physically damaged but the restoration of your contents to a new drive. An image should compactly hold everything, boot Sector and all files (the registry is several files in NT) either just the information or the exact disk layout including non-marked sectors. If you want to copy your partition to an external drive thats fine too, there are even many free tools you can use, provided you can access your external drive in dos. PC Inspector's clone max, and Ranish partition manager are two that I use. The only draw back are that these are simple copy programs, so no moving to a larger drive, I'll work but you won't have a larger partiton, no moving to a smaller drive, it will just not comply.


I've yet to use truimage and the only faults I've heard is that its secure zone and backup to USB drives were problem matic with it labeling images invalid for some reason. I have a free copy when they were giving way 6 or 7 (haven't used it yet) and I do know that this program is geared more for the power user and not really technical users. So make sure you read the manual beecause there may be a lot of options that seem similar but do different things.

[Ron B]

I use True Image 9 all the time to clone backup drives. You could do the disk image thing, that's fine, but I don't want to fool around with stuff like that. I have cloned backup drives for all three of my computers, including a laptop. If something happens, I shlap in the cloned drive, boot it up, then clone the working drive to the fubared drive. Every once and a while, I reclone the drives, especially if I've installed some new software or something.
You can install TI9, make a Restore CD, then uninstall it if you're not going to use it a lot, especially to clone drives. Then, to clone a drive, hook it up to an IDE or SATA connection on your computer(usually disconnect an optical drive) or use something like this. Boot the computer using the Restore CD and have it clone the drive. When it's done, use the Restore CD to boot to Windows, unhook the cloned drive(if you're using an external drive) or shut down Windows and remove the cloned drive. If you leave both identical boot drives hooked up, there may be problems.
It's a good idea to swap the cloned drive for the normal boot drive and fire up the computer to make sure the cloning went OK, but I only do that about half the time now because TrueImage9 is pretty reliable. Nice having a complete backup boot drive ready to go, saves a heck of a lot of time and worth the cost of an extra drive. I usually build my computers with a smaller boot drive, just for the OS and programs, all the data goes on other drives(and is backed up to external drives).

[JohnnyMalaria]

FYI, with Vista, Microsoft have improved (you may choose a different verb!) the built-in backup support. You can now backup the whole computer with each hard drive being copied to a separate Virtual PC hard drive.

This is potentially interesting because the virtual hard drive image may be opened in Virtual PC and you can access the files easily. (I haven't tried it yet but I have created a whole system backup so I'll have a try tonight, instead of watching The State Of The Onion).

[saab9k]

got the 10ver, is backing my shop computer every week to a second HD, do all except operating system.
Works great.

[bigstusexy]

I just thought of something for everyone that is cloning to a drive as backup.

Check out a firmware raid card or even windows (dynamic drives) for RAID, Mirroring.

Basically whatever is written or done to one disk is done to the other, not to mention that you can get the benifit of faster read speeds because it can read from booth at the same time.


This way you are insured that you are always uptodate and most times there is little you have to do if one disk dies, when you replace it rebuilding the mirror is automatic or a short number of clicks.

[jagabo]

I just thought of something for everyone that is cloning to a drive as backup.

Check out a firmware raid card or even windows (dynamic drives) for RAID, Mirroring.

Basically whatever is written or done to one disk is done to the other, not to mention that you can get the benifit of faster read speeds because it can read from booth at the same time.


This way you are insured that you are always uptodate and most times there is little you have to do if one disk dies, when you replace it rebuilding the mirror is automatic or a short number of clicks.

And if windows becomes corrupt for any reason other than a disk error you're screwed because both drives have the same error.

[bigstusexy]

If you don't want realtime backup then don't use those options, as far as windows being out of whack there are tons of ways to get either going or back on track.