Image File Not saving to USB on Exit
Hello
I've looked around for anything relating to the issue I'm but can't seem to find anything and was hoping someone could help.
I'm trying to backup a 150GB SATA drive to a 8GB USB stick using Acronis True Image Home V10 (b 4,871).
The backup successfully completes and validates. If I go to run a restore without exiting from Acronis I can see the .tib file on the USB stick. However, as soon as I exit Acronis the .tib image file disappears from the USB. I can't see the file via windows explorer and Acronis can't detect it. If I look at the properties on the USB it looks as though there's a hidden file taking up space but I can't find it (I've got my folder options set to show hidden files).
PC Specs:
IBM SurePOS 4852-566 (Point of sale terminal)
Windows XP Embeded
Intel Celeron E1500 2.2GHz
1GB Ram
150GB Western Digital SATA Drive wd1602abys-23b7a0 (2 partitions: 145GB primary NTFS and 4GB FAT)
USB:
Lexar 8GB
Formated to bootable Fat 32
Created Acronis bootable media (both versions but only Safe version detects the HDD)
I've created images of other POS terminals in the past using Acronis the difference being they were much smaller IDE HDD's. I'm having to use different USB sticks as the standard ones I use (Imitation 2GB) are too small as the image file is between 2GB & 3GD depending on compression level.
It's very frustraing waiting 2+ hours to take an image only to have it 'disappear'. I need to deploy the image on 100 new terminals and need something that will deploy quickly which I know Acronis can do.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on and how I can keep/restore the image file?
Thanks
Felicity
Thanks GroverH. I'll have a look at giving this a go.
I'm curious though as to how this might help my issue? I have no problems getting the backup to run it's just the file doesn't stay visible once Acronis is closed.
I am not sure that it will help your issue but it is an alternate method you can try.
You can also download a newer build (4942) for v10 via your online registration account and see if that helps.
For the beginning, did I understand it right that you boot from the bootable usb stick and run run backup selecting the same stick as destination?
Do you boot from the same USB stick you save the backups to? If no, what if you format the USB stick that you are saving the backup to, to NTFS?
If yes, I'd try to use other USB stick for the destination (you don't have to have the boot one connected after the product is loaded) - you can later copy the backup to the bootable stick - may be it get confused when writing to a bootable stick somehow.
You're correct dev-anon, I'm saving the image file to the same USB stick that I've booted Acronis from. This is the same process I've used previously to take successful images. I'll try a second USB tomorrow (need to bring in another USB large enough). Thanks for the help.
Just an update. I found a second USB and gave dev-anon's suggestion a try. I am happy to say this was successful. I now have the .tib file safely copied to my server and am in the process of running a restore. I can only assume the Fat32 file system had issues with the size of the image (2.9GB) which is shouldn't have but who knows.
If this restore works I'm going to attempt to partition the USB so I can have a bootable Fat32 partition to run Acronis and then a NTFS partition to hold the backup file. I'd like to have multiple restores going at once and can't buy double the amount of USB's to do so. I'll report back to let you know if this works.
Unfortunately the restore isn't as quick as the other images I have (they usually restore within about 3 minutes). Estimated time for this restore is over an hour. This could simply be down to the USB itself. It does eliminate the main reason I was trying to use acronis in the first place though.
The Safe Mode version uses the BIOS to access the drives. This is usually much slower than using Linux (the default).
I would also suggest trying build 4,942 since it may support the hardware directly. Another option is to use TI 2011 to restore the TI 10 image (the trial version can do this) if it supports the system.
I ran a lot of tests with flash drives on the older versions of TI. There are quite a few problems with it (a lot of them weird). One thing I found helped a lot was to keep the actual files small. For example, select to split the image into 500MB (or 200MB) chunks.
The problem may be caused by how TI is accessing the drive. It's possible that using a different booting method (Grub4DOS with ISO booting) might behave differently. You would have to try it to find out. Note that this wouldn't make it any faster.
If the transfer speed of the flash drive is fast in Windows, it would be the BIOS holding it back. You may want to check, though. A lot of "fast" flash drives are very slow when reading/writing small files or chunks of files.