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Best backup method for C:

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Hello:

In days of old, if you wanted to create a solid backup of your C: drive, you did not do so with the operating system running and did it with a bootable CD/etc to load some sort of system and start the backup.  For Acronis 2017, if you chose the Entire PC backup while in the normal bootable Windows 10 on your system, do you miss out on hidden/open files and thus have an invalid system C: backup?  

I do know there is the Recovery disk which I have created and used to ensure I have a copy of C: 'outside' of Windows 10 but like to have the whole PC (yes, multiple drives) backed up with full confidence that the entire system could be brought back.

Any insight / feedback is most welcome.

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

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Shaneme123, welcome to these user forums.

You can still do a full disk & partitions backup offline from the Windows OS by using the Acronis Rescue Media and it is recommended that you create and test the Rescue Media can be used for this purpose, as this is your means of recovery should you lose a disk drive or the OS cannot boot etc.

We do not recommend using the 'Entire PC' backup option unless you have a fairly simple computer system with only a single disk drive - the reason being that 'Entire PC' does exactly as it says, it includes any drives that are attached to the computer at the time the backup task is created and can include other removable drives you attach later.

The recommendation is to click through 'Entire PC' and select the option for 'Disks & Partitions' then select your Windows OS drive and all partitions for this.  This will only every include the same source drive & partitions.  Doing this type of backup from within Windows is fine and no data should be lost as Acronis uses the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to capture a snapshot of all the source data, including locked OS files & programs etc.

There are certain default exclusions which apply to doing any backup in Windows, i.e. the Windows pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys and swapfile.sys are all excluded and not needed for the purpose of recovery as each of these will be rebuilt by the OS on first boot.  System Volume Information is also excluded by default which is a little more contentious as this is where any System Restore Point information is stored, but again, if you are restoring a good image of a working OS system, this information should not be needed.

If you have multiple disk drives in your computer, then I would recommend making separate backups of each drive and not including them all in a single backup task / backup image.  Having separate backups will make the task of any drive recovery a whole lot easier and simpler, not to mention the size of the backup image being that much smaller too.

Thank you Steve; most insightful and helpful!  I removed the 'Entire PC' backup and doing Drive/Partition for each drive and spreading out the Incremental schedule to reduce load on PC.

Follow up question if you don't mind; I am backing up all my other drives to a big HD located in the same PC system.  I want to take images from time-to-time off-site of home for obvious reasons and not too keen on cloud backup.  Is it as simple as taking a big external HD and just doing a copy of the .tib's?  Or are the .tib's location sensative?  I would assume it would be rediculous to do a backup of the backup given the compression and encryption has already occured.

Thanks again.

 

Shaneme123 wrote:
I am backing up all my other drives to a big HD located in the same PC system.  I want to take images from time-to-time off-site of home for obvious reasons and not too keen on cloud backup.  Is it as simple as taking a big external HD and just doing a copy of the .tib's?  Or are the .tib's location sensative?  I would assume it would be rediculous to do a backup of the backup given the compression and encryption has already occured.

There is no problem with copying your .TIB files to another drive provided that you copy all of the files that are required to make a full backup version chain, i.e. if you are making incremental or differential backups, you need the Full backup plus all related incremental or differential backups that share the same backup sequence number in the file name - shown as _b1_  where b1 can be b2, b3 etc.  

.TIB files are only location sensitive when using the Windows Acronis application as the location is stored within the Acronis Database and associated with the backup task(s) shown in the GUI.  They are not location sensitive when using the standalone Acronis bootable Rescue Media which doesn't use or need to access the Acronis Database.

There is no need to try to backup the backup files, especially as one of the default exclusions for any backup is to exclude *.tib files, so the backup would run very quickly and give you a very small backup file with no .tib files inside it!