A new confidence level
After years of using True Image and (knock on wood) never having a need to restore a full drive, I finally got around to testing this process. I have an old laptop that I considered expendable for the test. I had not wanted to risk an important PC before.
Since the laptop only has two USB ports and one was required for the mouse (no Windows 10 driver for the mouse pad), I used a disk dock and went with the Survivor kit approach on a USB 2.0 port. I created it and ran a full backup with no exclusions under the Windows ATI UI. I then booted the Survivor kit and ran another full backup (no exclusions) to the drive.
The first thing I noticed was a significant size difference between the two backups. The one created under Windows was 12,287,556 KB. The backup created from the booted drive was 16,859,980 KB. That is quite a difference. I have not yet compared to see why. Any thoughts?
Next was to restore using the Windows version (both the UI and the backup file). Restoration went swimmingly and all looked perfect. I don't know how long it took but I suspect somewhere close to an hour. I took time off for breakfast while it was running. I had not selected to reboot after the recovery, but when I came back Windows was rebooted.
The next test was to restore by booting the Survivor kit and restoring the backup created under that boot. I chose to restore all partitions. Two add things to note. The first is that it asked me to select the destination for Disk 1, and yet Disk 1 was the destination. That seemed a bit confusing, although I suppose it makes sense. The second is that it failed to lock drive D: (the C: drive under Windows) and said to try again with the Linux version. I just tried it again so that I could make note of the error but that time it worked. The recovery time was only about 20 minutes, even though the file was over 37% bigger than for the other test. After the reboot, all appears OK.
Finally, there was a checkbox on the second restore about maintaining disk signature. It was not checked by default and I did not check it. Restoring to the same disk probably made that a redundant option. If I was to restore to a new drive, would that be important to check?
G. Uphoff wrote:If you start from Acronis from a boot medium, in my opinion there are no exclusions checked, which can lead to a larger backup archive.The disk signature should be checked when restoring an identical construction or with the same hard disk / SSD (only works with partition style "MBR") in order to avoid huge incremental / differential backups.
Unchecking "Restore disk signature" will damage the VSS configuration.
For GPT hard drives / SSDs, only the Windows partition should be restored, for example, so as not to damage the disk signature.
In both backups, I unchecked the exclusions. The two backups were done very close to each other and in comparing the contents of each .tibx, they appear to be nearly identical. The only difference I could spot was one additional file in the Temp folder on the second backup. A have to assume different compression methods were used.
In the process I also came upon a weird bug. When I used the Windows Explorer to open a .tibx file and then minimized the window, I could not restore it to the screen again. Clicking on the item in the taskbar just gave me an error beep. I need to try this on a different PC.
This test was run on an old MBR 2009 vintage machine. I ran VSS Doctor on the restored drive and there were no errors. I then decided to look into the disk signature issue a bit. I made note of the disk signature using diskpart. I decided to rerun the restore but this time checking the Restore disk signature box which was not checked on the first restore. When completed, the diskpart reported signature was the same.