Some question about Acronis True Image
So I'm considering purchasing Acronis True Image 2012 but I am unsure of some stuff.
I have a 128GB SSD and a 2TB HDD that I have Windows use for my documents, pics, videos, music, and desktop directories (So it would be D:\Music or D:\Documents). I would like to do occasional (once a month?) backups of the 128GB to the 2TB HDD in case my Windows drive goes fubar. Some questions:
1.) If I were to flash my SSD (which erases all data) would I be able to re-image the SSD with my backup with no problems?
2.) If I were to ever get a larger drive for C:\ (which is the 128GB SSD) would I have no issue imaging it with my Acronis made backup? No potential problems? Or would it be better if I made a bootable CD and just cloned the drive to the new one?
3.) In the event of re-imaging my drive, or any for that matter, should I use 'sector-by-sector' or 'Back up unallocated space' or does that not matter?
4.) I noticed a setting called 'Compression Level' under the 'Performance' tab, I assume this compressed the .iso it would make? Wouldn't that just cause issues? I am not so sure about this.
Also any advice or anything I seem to be missing or not getting? Thanks for the help
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But what does it do? Does it just increase how long it takes to back up? It won't make my Windows install compressed right?
Oh and looking at Amazon and here there seems to be quite an uproar over 2012. What exactly are the issues other than "it doesn't work!" or other vague all cap spam? I mean I figured the cloning feature is bugged from a post or two here, but the rest seems vague.
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Think of a tib file in the same way you might think of a zip or rar file, compression just compresses the contents to a greater degree, when you 'unpack' it (restore/recover) the contents regain their normal size. So no, recovery will not leave you with a compressed OS system.
In your case (apart from the fact increasing compression does indeed increase the time it takes to make an image), because you have many pic, videos and music files you will not see any benefit as they are already in compresses formats (unless the pictures are in RAW format) and you might actually end up with a larger image than necessary. Normal compression will be just fine or no compression if you are only going to target media files.
If you are restoring the system drive/partition it is always a good idea to start that from the recovery CD, TIH will reboot Windows into the Linux environment anyway so it is better to start from an environment that has no Windows running at any time, this would be the rescue CD.
You need to make sure the rescue CD can boot your machine and see all your drives, as it is based on Linux, sometimes really new motherboards or peripherals won't work with the CD due to the lack of drivers. There are in most case ways around this possible problem.
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So from the Boot CD I can restore a backup that is on an HDD? I'll mostly just be backing up C:\ since D:\ has like 1TB worth of media on it and no OS files other than pagefile. It'd take an eternity too and I'd need another drive for the back up of all that data.
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Z Overlord wrote:So from the Boot CD I can restore a backup that is on an HDD?
Yes, that is the whole idea of the CD.
But make sure your system boots from the CD before going much further.
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