Cant restore from incremental images
Hi
I am desperate to restore to an an incremental image from yesterday. I try to restore from it and it seems to execute but when the machine reboots there are no changes i.e. I still have the current image, not the one I am trying to revert to.
I'm in China on business and I really need to get back to my yesterday image for some presentations tomorrow. Any help would be most appreciated.
What am I doing wrong?
TIA
Derek
PS I dont have my 'today' image. I mistakenly wrote the WinRE image to the C:\ partition and then it wouldn't boot at all. I got some one else to cut me an ATI boot disk but I have only got my base image which is over 3 months old. I have learnt my lesson and I will be cutting full images much more frequently from now on.
PPS I have a Fujitsu T900 with a recovery utility that I suspect may have its factory image stored in the WinRE hidden partition that the incrementals are trying to write to. Maybe it wont allow Acronis to overwrite it?
Heres some more data on this issue.
The image list consists of
1 full image ~52GB
1 incremental ~12GB
90 incrementals (daily) of less than 2MB each
I'm currently writing to you all on the 52GB full base image.
HHHHEEEEEELLLLP!!!!!
Always do the restores from the recovery CD. Boot your computer on it, browse for your backup, right click on it and choose restore. Remember that the recovery CD may show you drive letters different from the ones Windows assigns. Pay extra attention to disk labels, not drive letters when navigating to your backup, and selecting the destination of what to restore.
I hope your restore will work well.
As a side not, it is not recommended to have a long chain of incrementals. The rule of thumb is that your last full validated backup should never be so old that you would never be OK with going back to it if you had to.
Thanks for the reply Pat.
Its official. I'm an idiot :) My head is hurting, I'm tired but I now have hope. A couple of hours ago I was a very worried man.
Just got off the chat with acronis and it seems that I have backed up c: and d: partitions and saved them to the d:. I thought I had only backed up c: and that I was using d: as a temporary dump until I copy them to an external HDD every couple of days but at the moment I dont have that external HDD with me. Lucky I have the full list of images on d:. I'll buy one and then copy the files from d: and then do a restore.
I am still not really sure what my bad procedure was that allowed me to execute the restore and have no error message from ATI that my actions would result in zero change. When the guy from Acronis showed me how to do it the error message was clearly displayed that I could not restore a image to the same physical drive it was stored on. I knew I shouldn't be able to do it but my issue was I didn't know I had included d:\ in the original full backup.
I am very sorry I can't explain my original method so that others can learn from it, especially Acronis. I will try to re-create it just short of execution and if I do I will detail it. I will also detail what worked and the key points for others to have the confidence they are moving in the right direction.
Cheers
Derek
Check any restore options to make sure that your options are not prohibiting you from restoring an old file over a newer file.
If all you need is one or two files, you get those files as individuals rather than a group restore.
The key here to success is practice your procedures for recovery before a crisis arises.