[How to] recover an entire disk backup

Ed, it was written by myself and can also be found in the MVP User Tools folder on Google Drive that is linked from my signature.  Only one of the Acronis Engineers such as Ekaterina can make posts into stickies.

I thought it was written by you. Great job, by the way. Written so that even I can understand it. That should help a lot of people. 

Yes, that is a very good writeup. 

I've done only 2 or 3 restores, and each time there was some point in selecting the source where I came to a blank wall - where I thought I had correctly done the selection, but nothing was happening.  Each time I finally fumbled my way past the road block, but I have no idea how.  Having that document in front of me would have saved me a few minutes of panic.

Hi all,

I've made the topic sticky, thanks for pointing 

Steve, step-by-step guidance is really cool! 

Thank you. There should be more like this. A lot of people would find them welcome.

Hi Ed,

Check Steve's links in this post... there are a few out there.  Steve has done most of those, but the MVP's have been working to develop documentation and tools to supplement the product to make it even better.  FYI - we do this in our free time as volunteers :) 

MVP User Tools - Google Drive

Thanks Bobbo. Looks like some good stuff there. I'm sure there are a lot of people who appreciate what you MVPs do. Without your help it would be much more difficult for those of us who don't know what we are doing.

Thanks for the nice feedback, Ed.  It's fun for a lot of us to learn and try to solve problems and it helps keep us sharp :) I do it because I feel good when I can help someone else, but I also learn a lot about the OS, PC's and Acronis in the process so it's win/win for me.  Always happy to try and help when I can and so do the other MVP's.  

Hi,

I am trying to switch my hard drive from an HDD drive into an SSD drive (SanDisk Ultra) and i try to clone everything using the cloning feature from the Acronis True image 2017. As i was cloning my drive i followed all the instructions including booting from the rescue disk and put the SSD drive into the slot on my laptop. Unfortunately i have not been able to start my OS (Windows 7) after cloning. 

I read on the forum that the better way to do this is by doing backup first on the HDD and restore it on the SSD later on. As i was doing this method and following your instruction on the pdf file. When i reached to the part where it try to find the destination disk, the Acronis True Image software seems to hang up and there is that clock symbol that keep on spinning. 

Do you know if i missed anything here? My laptop is a toshiba Portege R930 running Windows 7 OS. 
Or did i do my backup correctly? I did my backup from inside the windows, should i run the backup from the bootable rescue media instead?

Thanks for the help

-Arief

Arief, welcome to these user forums.

The document you are following was written for doing a Restore of a backup to a drive, not doing a clone, so the steps will be different when doing the latter.

If you have made a full disk & partitions backup of your source HDD drive, including hidden partitions, then you should be able to restore this to your new SSD drive and achieve the same result as if you had done a clone, but with the added protection of having the backup to use should anything go wrong.

One key point about doing either a restore or a clone, is that the Acronis bootable Rescue Media should be booted in the same mode as is used by your Windows OS to boot, i.e. if Windows uses the EFI bootloader (has Secure Boot), then you should use the same for the Rescue Media.  See webpage: Check if your PC uses UEFI or BIOS for guidance on how to check the boot mode.

Also, the document was written for using the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media, though the panels should be the same or very similar if using the standard, Linux based, rescue media.  The key difference between the standard / linux media and the Windows PE media is the extra device support present in the latter, especially with the latest NVMe / M.2 / PCIe disks and also with Secure Boot enabled systems.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the information and the link on the UEFI or BIOS. I will check my system as soon as it finish backing up. 

This might be a newbie question but how do you make sure that the bootable media is booted in the same mode as used by Windows OS?

I create a rescue media on from Windows 7 and save it on the USB drive.  Then i change my boot sequence to look for USB device first before an HDD.

I dont think i see an option to select the type of boot when i create the rescue disk or maybe i missed it.  Is my method above correct in order to create the rescue media?

Thanks

-Arief 

Arief, take a look at post: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/121829#comment-378318 where one of the other MVP's posted a number of screen images showing different boot menu choices for Legacy and EFI boot menus.

Once you have confirmed which mode your Windows OS uses, then this should simplify the choice for which option to choose for the USB media.

Typically, if your computer supports both UEFI and Legacy boot, then you would see 2 different USB boot options, one just shown as USB, and another shown as UEFI (or just EFI) USB.

Check too if your computer offers a one-time Boot override choice menu, i.e. using the F12 keys (used on Dell & other systems) rather than actually needing to change the boot sequence in the BIOS.

Hi Steve,

Thank you so much for your prompt reply. I think i found my issue. It seems that i am backing up with the older acronis software and i backed up when i was still running windows. I am not sure if this is an issue.

So what i did is i use the rescue media and re-backed up again using the Acronis boot up in Linux mode. 

Now i was able to backup and restore to the new hard drive. 

Thanks for your support!

-Arief

Arief, thanks for the feedback - glad to hear that you have been able do your backup and restore successfully.

Hi Steve,

thank you for your acronis Restore Anleitung.Ich habe geschaft mit der Restore.Nach Success meldung war keine Fehler in Log.Der Rechner booted nicht hoch totz Universal build media und spezifikation der Treiber.Wie soll ich weiter gehen?

Sam

Sam, sorry but the Google Translate of your post didn't help me to understand the issue.  I would suggest posting in the Deutsches Acronis Forum für Privatanwender where one of the German MVP's can help you more directly.

Hi Steve,

thank you for your instructions on how to restore a disc.Following this i could complete the disc restoration till there appeared the ,, Recover operation succeeded,, message A check in the log file did not indicate any error.When the computer was restarted it could not boot up.How do i solve this probleme?

Sam

Sam, when you are restoring, have you removed the original disk drive and replaced it with the drive you are restoring to, so that the restored drive is connected to the same SATA cable & controller as the original drive and that this matches the information held in the Windows Boot Configuration Data?

Hi Steve,I just did so as you have described.The drivers I downloaded from the homepage of the computer which is Acer veriton 7900pro was for win ME/XP but  the new program is running on win 8.1.Maybe this might be the mistake.But where do I get the correct driver ?

Sam

Sam, please can I request that this problem be moved to a separate New topic as this one was really just to provide the tutorial document to help users wanting to do a restore, whereas you have a more specific problem that we should try to address in its own right and own topic.

The link in the original post gives me "Page Not Found". Is there an updated link or has the topic been removed?

I also did not find it on the google drive linked in a later message.

Thanks!

Bill, if you go to MVP User Guides and How To's on Google Drive then look for ATIH 2017 Disk Restore.PDF that is the tutorial document.

Ed, as the original creator of this forum topic, can you check to see if you still have edit authority in the new forum to update initial post as above until Acronis web developers get attachments working again for everyone.

Got it! Thanks!

It can also be found via Dropbox link: ATIH 2017 Disk Restore.PDF

Now I am confused.  I have done the clone thing from windows 3 times and none of them work.  Isn't the clone supposed to be an exact copy of the original?  It took well over an hour to clone the drive and didn't seem to have any problems.  If my system drive dies, I want to be able to pop in my clone and get back to work.  Is this possible.  If not, it seems I wasted my money.

These were all working on the win10 system.

Lynn

Lynn, please raise this as a New Topic rather than adding to this tutorial topic.

See also topic: [IMPORTANT] CLONING - How NOT to do this!!!

I created a full disk backup to my WD My Book USB drive.  I purchased a Seagate drive identical to the one in my computer, and installed it a USB case.  I thought I would be able to recover the backup to the Seagate drive so I would, in effect, have a clone of my computer drive.  When I boot to the Acronis bootable media I see the WD My Book, but I do not see the Seagate (I can see it in windows 10 disk manager).  Also my system has a hybrid drive 30 mg msata SSD with a Seagate 1 tb drive.  Acronis shows the computer Seagate as unsupported which I knew it would, but not sure why I cannot recover from one usb drive to the other?  Am I doing something wrong?  Thanks.

Paul, welcome to these User Forums.

Not sure why the Acronis Rescue Media is not seeing your new Seagate drive when installed in the USB case - it may be that the drive is unformatted and you need to use the option to Add Disk in the ATI application, or it may be that the drive is connected via a USB port or adapter that has no supported drivers in the Rescue Media.

In this particular scenario, you should be able to do the restore of your WD backup .TIB file to your new Seagate drive (connected via USB) from within Windows.

Because the backup file and the destination drive are both inactive in Windows, there should be no reason why the Acronis application should need to perform a reboot to continue the recovery to the new drive.

Steve

Thanks for the help.  I had formatted the drive but it was not assigning a drive letter.  Used diskpart and identified volume and selected it and then used the assign command to get a letter assigned.  Acronis 2017 sees the drive.  I used the recover files option and selected the entire disk and it worked fine.  Since I have a Dell AIO I haven't removed the existing drive and tested the " cloned" drive - it is a bit of pain but I intend to do.  However I am concerned whether I really created a clone using the recover files option from full pc backup - initially I selected to the recover pc option but the next screen gave me the date and time of backup I would restore from which was fine -- didn't proceed to the next step because I wasn't sure if it would give me the option of where to restore to or would default to the original system drive -- and didn't want to wipe out that drive - checked documentation but it wasn't clear to me.  I suspect I haven't created a "clone"  Thanks for the help and apologize in advance if these are dumb questions.

Paul, just doing a Recover Files will not give you a working Windows OS on your target drive, you need to use Recover Disk(s) for this.

Hello all.  Just deployed ATI2017 and I am certainly impressed.  I read the users manual and also most current posts and articles.  What is still a bit muddy for me in the context of restoring:

what is MBR and Track 0,  and when do/not check that box?

and

what is Recover Disk Signature,  and when do/not check that box?

Thanks in advance.

Jim T

Jim, welcome to these User Forums.

MBR and Track 0 only relate to older systems using MBR formatted drives / Legacy BIOS.  These would normally only need to be selected when doing a restore/recovery to a new disk drive where this information will not already be present.  If restoring to the same disk drive where that drive has not been completely zeroed, then it is not needed to select these options.

If you have a UEFI BIOS system that uses GPT formatting for the drives, then MBR and Track 0 is not relevant.

The Disk Signature is used by some OS Applications such as MS Office for Activation purposes, so if replacing a disk drive with another drive, you would need to recovery the Disk Signature from the old drive to try to avoid activation issues.

Thank you very much.  Quite clear now!

so what's the point? who wrote it?

Anna, I wrote the 'How to' document to help users doing this type of recovery of an entire disk where the user guide was not as clear as it ought to be.

Hello All, I want a know if i can make a backup on a precise date like today for a future restore when i going to need it.

My pc is running like i want and i want to preserve that situation.

Somebody can help me with that

Andre, welcome to these User Forums.

Please use the option to open a New Topic for your question and we will be glad to help you.  This topic is really only dealing with helping users to recover a full disk backup.

Hello Andre, I've created a new topic for your raised question https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2017-forum/make-backup-precise-date 

Next time, to start a new discussion please open a particular forum section e.g. Acronis True Image 2017 and click on Start new topic at the right panel of a forum page. 

I would appreciate a helpful word from one of you folks.  I have bought every Acronis Tru Image since 2011 and currently need a tip relative to restoring to a Lenovo Yoga laptop.  This laptop has only ONE usb port active at boot time and does not work well with USB port hubs or port expanders - as a result, I can start my laptop with the rescue flashdrive but there is no way to attach the recovery  flash/drive where the backup is stored. I don't want to use the  boot SSD as that may have failed and be the reason I am restoring. So I thought I could use the CACHE drive which is no longer needed since I have installed a good fast SSD. So here is the question to Y'all.

Is there a way to install or copy the rescue media boot info to the cache SSD (24GB avaiilable) so I can boot from that and then use the one working USB port for the flash drive with the backup on it.

Thanks

Pat

Patrick, which actual version of Acronis True Image do you have here?

With the latest versions of ATI there is a new option offered to create a Survival Kit on an external USB drive, this allows you to boot from the drive and then use the second partition on the drive for backups or recovery.

See the following information resources:

KB 61639: Acronis True Image 2019: How to create Acronis Survival Kit

KB 61738: Acronis True Image 2019: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems

Article: The Acronis Survival Kit

Note: you can manually create the same type of survival kit by first creating a 2GB FAT32 partition on your backup drive using a tool such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software to move the existing partition along to make space, then allocating a Windows drive letter to the FAT32 partition.  You could then just point the Acronis Rescue Media to the FAT32 partition for where to create the boot media.