Questions regarding backing up entire PC

Hello Dan,

Without seeing more information on the size of your partitions, it is difficult to be certain about what might be involved here, but having a Dell laptop in front of me, I suspect that at least two of the partitions being included in the 'entire PC' backup will be a Dell Diagnostica partition and a Recovery partition - the latter of these can typically be 10GB in size or greater depending on what Windows OS came preinstalled - this may equate to your WinRE partition (Windows Recovery Environment = WinRE?).

At the end of the day, the important point here is that you need to include all the partitions that will be needed to effect a valid, working restore image that you can put back in the event of a major failure.

Dell Diagnostic partitions are normally fairly small, perhaps less than 100MB on older systems - these are important if you want to diagnose any potential hardware issues that might arise but probably less important for a desktop system than for a laptop.

The Recovery partition can probably be discarded (in terms of restoring in the event of a drive failure) as your Windows 10 system is licensed to the specific hardware of your Dell desktop system, so you always have the option of performing a clean install of Windows 10 if all else failed!  The only things worth keeping are any Dell specific hardware device drivers but these can normally be downloaded from the Dell Support web site after entering your unique system Service TAG code (found on the label on the system).

So best to keep everything? PC is less than 3 months old. win10 preinstalled.

thanks for your advice..

Dan, with Windows 10, check that you don't have any Windows.Old folders on your system drive partition (C:) as these can add an extra 20GB ++ to the backup image size if present.

It can be worth running the Windows Disk Cleanup utility (right-click on the C:\ drive, then select Properties) then once the initial Disk Cleanup panel opens, click on Cleanup System Files which will rescan the drive for additional files that can be cleaned - select all very large groups of files if present.

Dan,

Entire PC is designed to backup up all internal drives in a system (click the link to see how Acronis describes it), not just the main C: drive.  I never use it for this reason.  I always use "Disk and parition" and specifically check the box at the top of the exact drive I want to backup to ensure it is the only drive being backed up (just in case).  This also prevents a new drive being included with this backup if I ever add a new internal drive as extra storage for something else.

In your case, those extra paritions are most likely from the manufacturer.  WinRE is Windows Recovery.  If you have a generic prebuilt machine (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc), you may also have a separate OEM default factory recovery partition as well.  

Regrdless of using "Entire PC" or the "Disks and Paritions" option, if you select the entire disk, all of those paritions will be backed up.  I would recommend backing up your entire drive to avoid confusion and/or problems down the road.  At some point, you could then remove your OEM recovery partition to free up space, but unless you're not hurting for the space, just leave it there.

A few other notes for reference regarding the Acronis backups from within windows that apply to either backup type (entire pc or disk/partition)

1) By default, they always use compression - as a result, you can expect a full backup to be anywhere from 15-30% smaller than the size of the data on the entie disk (to include those hidden paritions).

2) The compression really has no impact on media files that have already been compressed when made (video an pictures in most cases).  

3) By default, acronis has default "exclusions" when run from within Windows.  Things like pagefile.sys, hiberfile.sys, recyclebin, .tib files and even certain folders from Chrome, Opera, and Firefox are excluded by default.  Make sure you remove any exclusions you don't want (like the broswer ones which will prevent your settings and/or favorites from being included in your backup).  You don't need your pagefile and hibernation file backed up so it makes sense to exclude those.

4) Steve is right about things like Windows.OLD which eat up space on your dive after an upgrade too.  

Thanks. Lots of choices.

tried full backup agaoin. 450gb disk with 291gb free and backup of 174gb fills disk and stops before finishing??

Did you select specific disks or still go "entire PC"?

entire PC. But the last one that worked was the same and the amount backed up was very close to this backup

Either you have more than one internal disk and it's backing them all up...

or..

You have selected to do a sector-by-sector backup and it is backing up the entire size of the original disk, to include the free space.  Be sure that under the adanced tab, sector-by-sector is not being used.

Also, if a disk is "unreadable" (corruption, bad sectors, etc), Acronis may default to sector-by-sector.  Just last night, I was attempting to backup a 16Gb WinPE bootable flash drive with portable apps that I have done so several times before.  Normally, the backup size is only about 4GB but kept resulting in a 13GB backup .tib file and it took a very long time to finish the last 1%.  I tried 3 times with the same results, even after running chkdks /f /r, formatting the drive and readding the data before backup and running the removable disk check utility in Windows.  I also restarted by computer and created a new backup task with a unique name and new location, but still the same results.  Even though all these tools tell me the drive is fine, I now suspect it has deeper issues.  I used another USB drive, moved the same files to it and it backed up in 3 minutes with the expected 4Gb .tib file.  I am going to try a deeper format of the original flash drive later when I have time and see if that gets it working better, but for now, it does look like it may be corrupt and that is the real cause of the larger sector-by-sector backups that are now occuring on it.

I will check tht setting. new drive arrivng today.

Also note that ATI might create automatically a sector by sector backup under certain conditions like disk errors, bad sectors, funny data (for example bitlocker, even after decryption).

Sector by sector was indeed turn on.  I have turned it off.  I also am using a new 1 TB western digital passport external drive to back up to.  The first backup I did was 48 GB for a hard drive that has 75 GB on it.  I don’t think it took an hour to complete along with the validation.  That seemed sort of unlikely so I added the sector by sector back on and let it run for about 3 hours.  At that point it had 6 hours left and had backed up 500 GB of a 1 TB hard drive.

So I reran the backup with the sector by sector turned off and again it finished rather quickly and is 48 GB.  I’m going to assume for now that that is correct and the program is functioning as it should.

How sector by sector backup ever get turned on I will never know.

I read quite a bit of the help file and I’m not feeling real confident about ever having to use these backups within a UEFI firmware.  The only purpose for backing up is a disk or a system failure which require new hardware.  From what I can tell your chances of succeeding recovering a backup to different hardware are kind of slim.  I hope I’m misunderstanding that part.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Dan,  recovery to other hardware (especially when in the same system) is very much indeed possible.  It's the different bios settings and configurations that usually gets people stuck as each manufactuer bios has different settings, options and features and may initially prevent a restore to a new system (like having secure boot turned on, preventing an external drive like Acronis recovery from loading... the older system being Legacy/MBR by default, but the new one being UEFI/GPT by default...  if the new system supports legacy you'd have to enable that first).  

Of course, before a major failure, it's always a good idea to test a restore.  I would invest in a spare hard drive (if you don't have one already).  Pull the original, install the spare and restore to the spare and see how it goes - should be fine on the same hardware.  You can then return to your original drive.

On a new system (new motherboard), it should still work, however, 1) you have to get all of the bios settings right  and 2) you may have to run Universal Restore if it BSOD's at first boot due to inompatible or missing drivers.  We used ATIH and Acronis snap deploy at work and deploy several computers a week (most with different hardware, but from the same base image) and have had a ton of success with this product.  Every time we get a new type of hardware though, it's usually just a matter of getting the bios configured correctly to allow the image restore process to work.   

For now, try to do some recovery tests of your own, using the offline bootable recovery media and a spare hard drive to learn the process and build up your confidence with the process so that you're prepared for a real-world recovery scenario.