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Backup Recovery from external device

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I am a long-term user of Acronis.

I have been backing up each of four computers to an external SSD for years. Last week I decided to experiment with file recovery process from an external SSD.  I was dismayed to discover that although I could backup from within the Acronis app, I was unable to access the SSD from within the Aronis app during a recover process. 

I learned to my dismay that to recover disk, partition or files that I must go through the awkward, needless step of rebooting the pc with rescue media. I cannot recover without this step. I view this as cumbersome and needless.  If I can backup from within the app, I should be able to recover from within the app.

I hope Acronis will take on the task of restoration without resorting to rescue media.

James Denneny

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James, first comment is that this is a user forum not an official support forum where Acronis lurk ready to respond to user issues!  Only rarely does any Acronis people visit here!

Second comment / question: If you are recovering the Windows OS then a restart of Windows will always be required in order to recover files / programs / data (i.e. registry files) that are in use and locked by the OS.

If you attempt to start an OS disk recovery in Windows, then Acronis will restart to launch a temporary Linux based environment from which to perform the recovery.  This may work for many users but not for anyone using certain features such as RAID, BitLocker encryption or with disk drives for which Linux does not have driver support, i.e. NVMe M.2 SSD's perhaps.

The safest method of doing an OS disk recovery is to create and then later boot the PC from the Acronis 'Simple' rescue media which is created from the Windows Recovery Environment and will contain both BitLocker and device driver support, as well as providing the PE files needed without requiring the install of the Windows ADK & PE Kits.

Note: if you are recovering to the same / original disk drive, so not performing a bare metal recovery following a complete disk drive failure, then it is possible to use a third-party tool such as EasyBCD to add an additional Windows Boot menu option for a local copy of the rescue media .WIM file to allow booting into the WinPE rescue environment without the use of external media.  I use this same approach myself on my main laptop.  It works because the Acronis offline application can be loaded fully into memory and therefore the .WIM file on disk can be safely overwritten during the recovery.

In the event of replacing a failed disk drive with a new one, then recovery is only possible by booting from external media.