TI9-Restore and profiles?
I had a backup of my full C drive, all folders starting at C:\, not a partition-type backup. I do these nearly every night, keeping each one until the following week when it gets overwritten by that day's backup, the most recent being in the wee hours of last Friday. It typically finishes up around 5 AM or so.
On Sunday, I ran into a weird issue on my PC. One the things I'd done on the machine to try to fix the problem was add 2 new user profiles, then while logged on as profile 3, copied stuff from profile 1 to profile 2. When that didn't fix my problem, I decided to simply restore from that earlier backup on Friday, which I did. When it was successfully done, I rebooted, and was *astounded* to see that the new profiles were still there. And my problem.
Now I KNOW I had the right backup, I'd specifically moved it from its usual place on the backup drive so it wouldn't get automatically over written, and it definitely was the one selected. And it was restoring everything, as best as I can tell without staying up all night to watch it. Those new profiles should not have been on that backup! Or they should have been completely overwritten by the restore, correct?
Am I misunderstanding how this works? As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that maybe the restore is just doing that, restoring what it has, and not wiping what was there before, as I ass-u-med it would do. Meaning that the new user profiles were not affected, since they just stayed where they were while everything got restored "around" them, as it were. That seems to make sense given what happened, but not being an expert on backup systems, figgered I'd ask.
In the future, to avoid this problem, what kind of backup SHOULD I be doing? What I'd certainly want is to restore back to a fully working system, not leave any junk out there!
TIA
elaine
Charlottesville, VA
To do what you had hoped to do you would have needed either a partition or complete disk image.
Ah, pretty much as I thought then. And this older version 9 of TI will do that? Disk image makes sense to me, mainly 'cause I don't quite understand the difference between a partition backup and creating an image. I do understand what an image is, mainly not the difference between the two.
Thanks!
elaine
Elaine,
All disks have partitions, even if it is just the one, it's just that for historical reasons it hasn't at the PC user level been 'sold' as that.
So, if your drive just has a C:\ showing, people often refer to that as 'my C drive'. In effect what you have is one disk with one partition. In this scenario there is little difference between a disk or partition image. The difference as far as True Image is concered is that a disk image will contain all the information of your C:\ partition and extra information that you aren't able to see such as the Master Boot Record (MBR) which is how your system knows where the files to start your system live, a partition image in this case would just be the C:\ part of your drive.
If you have a disk that has C:\ F:\Q or any other drive letter then you have partitions on the same disk and your OS will treat the almost as separate drives even though you've only got one physical drive. With this, you can mae a complete disk image which will contain the MBR and all the partitions, so you can recover the complete disks contents in one go or you could choose to either only image your C:\ partition or any of your partitions. It also means that you can restore just one partition if needs be.