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Saving to a virus infected drive

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I backed up my computer with Acronis 2016 - subsequently my computer was infected with the ZEPTO virus - Do I need to completely clean off the internal drive to install the saved contents ?

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Assuming you did a Disk and Partition backup you should be able to restore that image. Doing so will will overwrite everything on the drive. You will have to do this from your bootable rescue CD/USB drive. I'm assuming your are sure your backup is not infected. You can also run a scan to completely remove the infection and then make another backup once you are satisfied the drive is clean. If you only did a Files and Folders backup then restoring will not help.

I did whtever the Acronis 2016 program does.  Maybe I could check it on the external drive?

 

If you're not 100%, if possible, I would leave your original drive alone and try to restore to a different test drive, put the test drive where the original was and make sure it boots.  If it does, then feel free to do the same to the original drive. 

I realize not everyone wants to have a third drive (or has the funds to have one).  However, if data is critical, having a test drive makes 100% sense so that you never are "testing" a recovery with the live copy of whatever you currently have available. 

Thanks for the suggestion! Now, if I already have the contents of my hard drive on my external hard drive I saved using my Acronis 2016 program, and the drive boots up and all , why would I need to use any additional equipment like a CD copied off the Acronis program? I did make an emergency disk, BTW>

 

 

Your bootable recovery media is your safetynet and best friend.  If you can't boot Windows because it's corrupted, you either have to go through the pain of installing Windows clean, then installing Acronis just to get to your backups, or simply boot to your offline recovery media (CD/DVD - USB flash drive is better).  Then you can navigate to a backup file on your external hard drive, secondary disk or network share and restore it to any other drive of your choice.  

Personally, I never start a clone or full disk restore from within Acronis in Windows.  This is because, although it works for some, if the bios is not configured correctly, or the Linux version doesn't have the necessary drivers, it may fail to load.  As I'm sure you're aware, when starting a full disk recovery is started in Windows, it must reboot.  At reboot, Acronis reconfigures the bootloader and puts itself first.  It then boots into the Linux recovery enviornment.  If this fails and Acronis does not boot, then the original bootloader may not get restored automaticall and you may find yourself with a non-bootable Windows system. In most cases, this can be fixed with a Winows repair disk, but why take the risk when it can be avoided simply by using the offline recovery to begin with?  

Make sure to test your emergency recovery disc to see that it does detect all of your drives and/or NIC in case you need to use it down the road.  Better to know while things are working, than to find out it has an issue when you need it to work.