Exact copy of drive by backup and restore
I needed to copy a smaller SSD to a larger one. Exact copy. Simply more room. It seemed like a disk backup of the source, followed by replacing it with the target across a reboot and then a disk restore would do the trick. I used Partition Magic a lot way back when, and this was a common process. Doesn't restore properly. It thinks it does, but I get a disk with a lot of nonsense A to Z folders. Can't do a clone because I can't have the source and the target on the machine at the same time. Its clear I am totally missing the nature of how this product works. This is not a copy of the boot volume by the way, so the currently booted system should have no effect on this. Simply an image of an NTFS formatted disk and a resore of that image to another physical device. If I ever do crash a system it would probably be a good idea for me to know how to do this right. Thanks for any advice.
Acronis 10 runs under Linux and is on a CD so is entirely independent of Microsoft or Windows. Sadly it appears that in order to maintain a revenue stream, software developers have to keep adding "features" of limited utility.
This is not exactly correct. Acronis True Image 10, just like the latest Acronis True Image, runs under Windows (and there is also a Mac version). What you may be referring to is the ATI Rescue Media, which is a proprietary environment based on Linux that runs from a CD/DVD or USB flash drive. ATI Rescue Media can be created from any version of ATI, always has been and still is available. While used mainly for recovery, it can also be used as a simple (though not so user-friendly as the Windows app) backup tool.
Regarding backup protection, use ATI or the Rescue Media to create full disk mode backup. You would select the checkbox for the entire drive which therefore includes all partitions and hidden partitions. This creates a .tib archive. You can save many .tib archives, backups of various disks at various times, to a single external hard drive.
Wih a full disk mode backup, even if you suffer an entire hard drive failure you could just insert a fresh drive, recover from the image, and your system would be back exactly where it was before the disaster. All your system settings, all your installed software, all your files, your desktop, everything... would be exactly as it was.
If I understand you correctly, running ATI full disk backup is fine. Doing the restore however, I need to boot the standalone material in order to bring it down to a new drive. What I did was to run the disk restore from ATI. That produced garbage on the new drive. Will give it a try. Thanks much.
If I understand you correctly, running ATI full disk backup is fine. Doing the restore however, I need to boot the standalone material in order to bring it down to a new drive.
Yes, restoring disk or partition backups should be performed after booting from the ATI Rescue Media.
The procedure described by tuttle is the safest.
Also some of the suggestions in this post are relevant when using the preferred backup-and-recovery to transfer to new drive. All sorts of things can go wrong, some unexpected, such as power outage - my UPS may not keep the system going long enough to do a clone or full disk recovery. Then there is hte possibility of the power supply failing ....
Ian
Good points. I always clone a boot drive on a different computer than the machine the drive is actually for. I'm just not used to using a bare metal technique for a drive that doesn't really require bare metal. Thanks again.
Many thanks for a detailed reply tuttle, I am most grateful.
I have always been concerned about the idea of creating an "Image" from within a running system and would feel much happier using a standalone CD or USB PenDrive.
Making interim backups of data is an entirely different question and so long a one has closed all applications (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Oultook, etc. I can entirely see the logic of making a full backup followed by incremental backups. I assume that Acronis True Image 2017 is more than capable of doing this well?
Returning to the ATI Rescue Media, can this be placed simply on a bootable USB PenDrive and if used to image an entire drive, does it compress the resulting image file?
Incidentally, the system with which I am concerned has a 512MB Samsung PM961 M.2 SSD as a system disk and a 3TB 3½" SATA HDD used to store data. Does Acronis True Image 2017 work reliably with M.2 SSDs?
Incidentally, my comment about the creeping featurism motivated by Marketing people and bean counters doesn't apply specifically to Acronis, it is endemic - Microsoft is probably the worst.
Terry, when a full disk & partitions backup is performed from within Windows, then it uses the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create a snapshot of the data being backed up which enables system / OS files and programs etc to be captured in the backup.
Many users, myself included, do regular backups in this way and these are fine for doing recovery of the system if needed.
The Acronis Rescue Media offers an alternative approach for doing backups and is one that is capable of doing a bare-metal recovery, but which can also make complete backups of the computers where used, outside of Windows etc. Again, many user, myself included, use this approach too - I do this when about to work on a system that I have been given to repair for example, where there may be a virus infection or other problem, so that I have a backup to get back at least to where I started, but also which allows recovery of any user data from the system.
The Rescue Media can be created on a 1GB USB memory drive or you can use upto a 32GB USB stick - this has to be FAT32 formatted in order to be used and be bootable. It can also be created in 2 different 'flavours' - the standard, Linux kernel based, media or the Windows PE media that uses the Windows 10 ADK and boots in a similar way to a normal Windows Install or Rescue media does.
Backup images created by the Rescue Media should be stored on a separate USB HDD due mainly to the sizes that are involved, and Acronis will typically achieve a compression ratio of between 20% to 30% depending on the types and mix of files in the source data.
Support for M.2 SSD's, NVMe SSD's is included in the latest build versions of both ATIH 2016 and 2017 but this is where the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media comes with advantages, in that additional device drivers and also Intel RST support can be included / injected into the PE media - this is because these types of drives are often configured to work in RAID mode to take advantage of the deeper queue lengths this provides for the drives, and RAID devices are not as well supported by the standard, Linux based media.
See the sticky post in the 2017 Forum for the MVP Tool - Custom ATI PE Builder which makes creating customer WinPE Rescue Media with added drivers / support a matter of selecting a few extra choices from a menu. Link below.
Fantastically helpful answer Steve, very many thanks. I will order a copy and give it a go!
Incidentally, I take it that ATI 2017 will not restore from an image made with an earlier version (i.e. ATI 2010) so I would need to retain a copy of that?
Terry, on the backward compatibility question, officially as per KB document: 1689: Backup Archive Compatibility Across Different Product Versions then ATIH 2017 has only been tested as far back as archives from ATIH 2015.
Unofficially, you would need to test this with your ATIH 2010 .TIB files to see whether they are recognised and can be opened etc. I would recommend keeping a copy of the 2010 Rescue Media just in case. I have lots of CD's from the different versions I have used over the years and these don't take up much space!
Many thanks for a detailed reply tuttle, I am most grateful.
You're welcome. Steve answered your follow-up questions, so I'll just add a bit.
I have always been concerned about the idea of creating an "Image" from within a running system and would feel much happier using a standalone CD or USB PenDrive.
In ATI terminology, a "backup" can be either a full disk/partition backup or a files/folders backup. Both types of backups result in a .tib image file. As Steve says, even a full system disk backup can be reliably created while Windows is running. If you prefer, or in specific situations, you may choose instead to create such backups after booting from the ATI Rescue Media. I do it often.
Making interim backups of data is an entirely different question and so long a one has closed all applications (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Oultook, etc. I can entirely see the logic of making a full backup followed by incremental backups. I assume that Acronis True Image 2017 is more than capable of doing this well?
Yes, ATI can perform files/folders backups, and can perform differential or incremental backups.
my comment about the creeping featurism motivated by Marketing people and bean counters doesn't apply specifically to Acronis, it is endemic - Microsoft is probably the worst.
Feature creep is common with many tools, as companies naturally want to announce something new to attract buyers. Regarding ATI, I know that some of the new features are not from "bean counters" but are based on what Acronis staff see as real threats to users' data and security.
I am not a systematic as Steve in keeping older versions of recovery media. I forget to properly lable the CD/DVD. What I do do is to keep coplies of the most recent ISO for each Acronis product I have used over the years, together with the most rescent installation file. This is located on my NAS so I can find it whenever needed. This solution only works if you have multiple devices!
Ian
If all your different Acronis products are registered to your Acronis account, then .ISO images of the standard (Linux) rescue media could always be downloaded from there if needed. For any WinPE Rescue Media, then you would either need to keep copies of the optical or USB media, or else keep ISO (or .WIM) image files for these.
The various posts above pretty much convinced me - right up to the point where I went to purchase Acronis True Image 2017. Having Googled it to find the best deal I encountered a review by PCMag. In fairness, they are very complimentary and they do award it " Editors' Choice".
However, they do comment on two issues:
- Cloud options still in the software even if you didn't buy the cloud service. In the name of all that is sacred, WHY? I don't want to backup to the Cloud, why should I have to pay for something I don't want and why should my PC have to have the feature built in?
- After you install Acronis, quite a few processes will always be running on your system, even for features you're not using. Again, WHY? Why can't I load Acronis when I want to use it and not have it stealing CPU cycles and RAM?
Is there any way around these unwanted features?
Incidentally, once again, many thanks for the detailed advice in the posts above and my profuse apologies to AKAllen whose thread I have hijacked.
The ability to make cloud backups is an integral part of the code it just sits there doing nothing until it is called on. Presumably it is loaded into ram when needed. Very few apps are modular, where you only install the features you want.
Many programs start multiple services on booting many of which may not be needed. These services can in aggregate have an adverse performance impact; some of the Acronis services can become resource hogs - I have never had it happen to me. (I doubt this has anything to do with my having quad core i7 CPUs which have hypqerthreading.) One of the MPvs has created a batch tile that will kill unwanted services. I am on the iPad at the moment so I cannot give you the link.
Ian
The link for the batch files is in my signature below - MVP Tools on Google Drive.
It was all interesting. I have my own cloud NAS in the house backed up by S3, so I'm very much into the belt and suspenders redundancy. The ATI restore went perfectly btw. One of the things I can't see how to do with Acronis is repositioning the partitions on the drive. Since these are Windows partitions I don't want to muck with them from my Linux tools. Every release of Windows, Microsoft seems to put in defensive changes to keep from cohabitating with Linux, and I've gotten a bit punchy from those 'adventures'.
For changing partition structure, I like the free MiniTool Partition Wizard. It's a bootable environment; I use it on a bootable USB flash drive environment into which I saved several tools including the ATI Rescue Media. MiniTool Partition Wizard allows you to create, delete, resize and rename partitions, and much more. There are many on-line tutorials on its use.
The various posts above pretty much convinced me - right up to the point where I went to purchase Acronis True Image 2017. Having Googled it to find the best deal I encountered a review by PCMag. In fairness, they are very complimentary and they do award it " Editors' Choice".
However, they do comment on two issues:
- Cloud options still in the software even if you didn't buy the cloud service. In the name of all that is sacred, WHY? I don't want to backup to the Cloud, why should I have to pay for something I don't want and why should my PC have to have the feature built in?
- After you install Acronis, quite a few processes will always be running on your system, even for features you're not using. Again, WHY? Why can't I load Acronis when I want to use it and not have it stealing CPU cycles and RAM?
Is there any way around these unwanted features?
Incidentally, once again, many thanks for the detailed advice in the posts above and my profuse apologies to AKAllen whose thread I have hijacked.
If you want to take backups on your own schedule without installing anything, you can use the rescue media and boot to it to backup or recover. However... drivers in the default linux rescue media may not be adequate for all systems (those using RAID ore those that are Windows only like Surface Pro 4). You can dlownload the rescue media as a .iso and burn it CD/DVD and test it on your own system which may be all you need. If it can't detect your drives, then you would need to build winpe rescue media, but to do that, it requires the software to be installed.
You can turn off most services in the product (to include those related to the Cloud, mobile backup, synchronization, and even the newer NG protection items in the NG version). The MVP bat scripts are supplemental to the Acronis product, but make the process pretty easy. On my home systems, I only have the scheduler service running so that my automated scheduled backup run, everything else is disabled with the click of a button from the appropriate .bat script.
So far, not so good.
I downloaded the ISO CD and tried it on the system from which I want to make an "Image". It would not boot.
I then tried booting on a 64-bit desktop system (Intel Haswell chipset & Z97 Southbridge), a 64-bit laptop and an ancient 32-bit desktop system. They all worked absolutely fine, I even made an image of the 32-bit system from which I imagine I would be able to restore if I wanted to - I don't as it happens.
The only difference I can see is that the system which would not boot the ISO CD is a very modern system - with an Intel Z270 chipset and UEFI interface which I guess may not be supported by the version of Linux used for the ISO CD whereas the other three systems all have the old style BIOS interface.
Would this explain the problem and is there any way around it?
The boot media may not boot for a couple of reasons..
1) is secure boot enabled in the bios? If so try disabling it. secufre boot prevents third party bootloaders from running.
2) Some bios only can boot third party bootloaders if CSM/Legacy mode is enabled (even if the system is UEFI).
3) Acronis Rescue media in 2015/2016 and 2017 is both UEFI and Legacy mode capable. However, if a bios supports both, you may need to use a one time boot menu or boot override menu to specifically pick UEFI instead of legacy as well.
4) Some bios just don't like to boot UEFI media from CD/DVD and default to CSM\legacy with them. You can try building a USB flash drive rescue media, but that requires you do so from a system that has Acronis installed
5) You're not here yet as it hasn't even booted.. however, WinPE rescue media built with Microsoft ADK may have advantages over the default Linux rescue media - especially if built with Windows 10 ADK and especially even more, if you build it with our MVP WinPE builder tool which adds some drivers that help detect newer PCIE NVME drives and/or RAID controllers that the Microsoft ADK does not have included by default. You can decide if WinPE rescue media is needed after you get it to at least boot - if the default Linux rescue media can see your drive - you don't need WinPE.
Right now though, you need to get it to detect and boot - my guess is a bios setting like secure boot preventing it from loading - find that and turn it off, then try the CD/DVD again. If that just won't detect in UEFI mode, building a USB rescue media with Acronis may work out better.
Got many useful information. Thankyou
FINALLY! Managed to boot from the CD by using function key [F11] and selecting the appropriate "version" of the CD drive -
SATA3_0: OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7200S
rather than
UEFI: OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7200S
I have no idea why that worked but it did and I successfully made an IMAGE backup, deleted some programs and files and then restored everything. Onwards . . .
I will now have a go at working out how to use Acronis 2017 reliably. I am doing this on behalf of two people who have recently suffered as a result of complacency over making regular backups.
Many thanks for the patience and all the help.
Terry, glad to hear that you have this working for you now.
The two different options for your Optiarc DVD drive show that your system is capable of booting in both Legacy and UEFI modes, and you were able to boot the Rescue CD in Legacy mode.
Having installed the trial version of Acronis I have now worked out how to create a bootable ATI 2017 Rescue USB PenDrive and created one (it wasn't that obscure).
As it happens the resulting USB PenDrive boots and goes through the motions but doesn't actually complete. This is understandable since it was derived from a trial version of Acronis.
Glad you got the USB working as well. Yes, the trial version, does not allow backups to be taken with the rescue media, only recovery. A licensed version will unlock that feature so that you can take or restore backups with the recovery media.
Terry, the trial media is limited with regard use on the bootable media.
Purchased a copy of Acronis 2017, installed it on the newly built system, made interim and a final Image copy and delivered the complete package.
Now I need to play with and learn how Acronis actually works for backup purposes using a trial version in order to educate the user.
Terry, the ATIH 2017 User Guide is a good source of reference information, and you can find a number of good video tutorials via post: 117004: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources though some of these are showing older versions of the product but the principles remain the same.