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Help understanding recovery before I upgrade from 2009 to 2016

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Purchased Acronis True Image Home 2009 seven years ago and finally decided to try it.  I'm now using a Windows 7 system and found out it isn't ueft? compatible. Before I upgrade to 2016 do I understand that I can copy my complete system(C: and D: drives) and then do a complete restore if needed without a separate boot or recovery disk? Thank you, Bob

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Bob, 

See KB document: 5684: EFI Based Operating Systems Support in Acronis Products which with regard to your ATIH 2009 product, states:  

Other Acronis products do not support systems with Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). 

This means that even if you install ATIH 2009 on your Windows 7 system, if this is a UEFI system, then attempting to do a complete system backup on this system would fail because ATIH needs to modify the UEFI boot loader in order to create a bootable temporary Linux OS environment from which to run the Acronis program to perform the backup (& recovery) actions.  As ATIH 2009 does not support UEFI systems it will not know how to make these changes!

The options that you have at this point are:

  1. Sign-up for a Trial of the ATIH 2016 product, install this and make your full system backup, plus also create the bootable Acronis Rescue Media for this version on CD/DVD or USB stick.  The rescue media is needed should you allow the trial to lapse because it then will only permit you to use the application in Recovery mode only.
  2. Sign-up for the Beta trial of the ATIH 2017 product at http://www.acronis.com/en-us/homecomputing/trueimage/beta/2017.html and use this as per step 1.
  3. Opt for a different backup & recovery product that has the required UEFI support etc.

Note: It is not recommended to attempt either the recovery of your computer system from within Windows - this has been known to cause significant problems if anything goes wrong when modifying the UEFI boot loader configuration which may require a repair using Windows media.

The recommended method is to use the Acronis bootable Rescue media which does not modify or make any changes to any of the Windows components or the boot environment.

You may wish to look at post: 117004: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources for helpful videos on these subjects.

I intend to upgrade my ATIH 2009 to ATIH 2016. Does this have the Acronis bootable Rescue media you mentioned. Is it correct that I can copy my complete system(C: and D: drives) and then do a complete restore if needed without a separate boot or recovery disk using ATIH 2016? Thank you, Bob

Bob,

2016 does have an offline recovery disk as well.  The Windows GUI version of Acronis will also allow you to start a restore from within Windows, but will then reboot the system and boot into Acronis - similar to if you had booted your recovery media - I do not recommend this though - there is room for error here that can cause boot issues with the OS if something goes wrong with starting Acronis if the process is started from within Windows.  I would always use your offline bootable recovery media whenever attempeting to do a full disk or partition restore to avoid the possibility of your windows bootloader becoming corrupted (as can happen if you start a disk/partition recovery from within Windows).  HOWEVER, if you just need to grab data files (documents, pictures, music, etc), using the recovery feature in Windows is just fine.  You can also double click backup .tib files in Windows and then copy and paste files out of the backup; or, you can mount the backup .tib file as a drive letter and copy and paste data out of it too.

Acronis 2016 does not support 2009 backups so take a full backup with 2009 as a final point in time and hold onto your 2009 offline bootable recovery media to use in case you need it for that backup or any existing 2009 backup you may have.  Moving forward, once 2016 is installed, create a new 2016 bootable recovery media and start a new backup with 2016 and then use your 2016 bootable recovery media for your 2016 images if you ever need to restore an entire disk or parition.