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Difference between Disk and Partition recovery

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Can you please explain the difference between disk and partiton recovery, they both seem the same.

Michael

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Michael, welcome to these User Forums.

The key difference between doing a Disk or Partition recovery is the volume of data that you are wanting to recover, which probably sounds obvious.

From your screen shot, you have a large WDC disk drive with 2.7TB used space out of the total capacity.

If you do a Disk level recovery, then you will be recovering the 2.7TB of used data stored across the 3 separate Partitions shown in your screen shot.  This would be the normal recovery performed when you have suffered from a disk failure and perhaps have replaced the WDC disk drive with a new disk of similar capacity.

If you do a Partition level recovery, then depending on which partition you choose to recover, then you could be recovering as little as 43.7MB (for the EFI System Partition - essential to boot into your Windows OS on an UEFI system), to 394.2MB for the Windows Recovery partition, upto your main Acer C: OS partition with 405.8GB of data to recover.

A Partition level recovery is useful when resolving a problem that impacts on one partition only, i.e. recovering the C: OS partition after a failed Windows Update issue.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Steve thanks,

Exactly what happened to me, after a Windows update my PC failed to reboot and the roll back option also failed, I tried to recover using Acronis startup disk and a full backup, it went through all the genie procedures  and the progress bar but this also failed. I had to have the drive wiped and Windows 10 restored, I still have the good Acronis backup and can recover files but I would much prefer to restore the the original full backup state to include all of my software apps without the hassle having to re-install and register again.

In your experience is it OK to recover a full backup from within Acronis with Windows running must I recover using a start up disk?

Michael

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Steve thanks,

Exactly what happened to me, after a Windows update my PC failed to reboot and the roll back option also failed, I tried to recover using Acronis startup disk and a full backup, it went through all the genie procedures  and the progress bar but this also failed. I had to have the drive wiped and Windows 10 restored, I still have the good Acronis backup and can recover files but I would much prefer to restore the the original full backup state to include all of my software apps without the hassle having to re-install and register again.

In your experience is it OK to recover a full backup from within Acronis with Windows running or must I recover using a start up disk?

Michael

Michael, I would always recommend doing any disk or partition recovery by using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media.  If you start that type of recovery from within Windows using the ATI application, then Acronis has to modify the Windows Boot Configuration Data configuration in order to create a temporary Linux OS environment from which to boot and launch the offline Acronis recovery application.  If any issues arise that prevent the BCD changes from being reversed / removed, then you can end with an unbootable OS drive.

When booting from the Acronis rescue media, then you need to choose the correct BIOS boot mode, which in your case should be the UEFI entry for your boot media.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image 2017: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media for examples of what the boot panels should look like for you.

See also forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup which was written to help users understand this process.