Acronis Survival Kit - helpfull?

Uwe, if your external drive is working fine with your MBR system then do not try to convert it to GPT as this is not needed.

The Survival Kit is just an automated method of doing what is already possible with any removable drive, i.e. create a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the beginning of the drive then write the ATI Rescue Media to that partition.

If you use a partition tool such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can do this yourself and the MVP Custom ATIPE Builder script will use the FAT32 partition as the target provided it has a drive letter allocated to it.  I have done this myself on a couple of drives and it works well.

There should be no need to recreate all your ATI backups on the drive.

A PC with and MBR boot disk can happily work with other drives that are GPT. MBR only supports drive sizes up to 2TB, so it is possible that it has MBR rather than GPT. You can boot from GPT drives (except possibly if you have a really ancient PC that does not support GPT).

I converted the boot drive of two PC from MBR to GPT without any drama (Windows 10 Pro with latest build). I nave never tried converting a data drive from MBR to GPT. Normally I would say create a backup first out of abundant caution, but this is you backup drive so not presumably possible.

Does it make any sense to use the Survival Kit - having the recovery media and the backup on the same drive simplifies the recovery process (you do not have to work out which back-up is the one your want if you have multiple backup tasks). You can use the same one Survival Kit with several computers (not sure if the boot-process gives a choice of booting UEFI or legacy and the normal recovery media does - I have not tested that aspect. There may be something in the documentation.

Ian 

Ian, the boot choice between Legacy & UEFI should be exactly the same as if you were booting from a USB stick with the rescue media.

Having the rescue media on the same physical HDD as backup images or space for same has benefits for those with limited USB ports plus also saves having to figure out which drive is what if you have multiple USB sticks (as I do).

In my own case, I have the MVP WinPE version on my HDD in the 2GB FAT32 partition with all the benefits this brings (web browser, file manager, multiple applications...) and find this very useful plus have used it with both Legacy & UEFI systems since making it.

Thank you very much for your help!

I have a question about the Acronis Survival Kit.  I had a new 4Tb Seagate available and had it create the kit there.  As expected it carved out a 2Gb and 2Tb partition where the backup went and the subsequent tests seem to work well.  However it left another unallocated 2Tb area on the drive.  

My question is, can I just allocate and format the extra space for backing up our NAS for example?  There seems to be very little technical info on the Acronis Survival Kit except what I’ve found here.  

The information on the survival kit is minimal. I installed it on a 3 TB WD Elements 2.5" USB 3 drive.and ended up with two partitions. I do not recall the larger partition being less than the available space, In my case it merely resized the existing partition to make space for the Survival Kit partition. 

Have you tried resizing the partition to take up the free space. The "big" partition can be used like any other USB HDD.

One possibility for the 2 TB size may be that the disk is set up as MBR which limits the max size to 2 TB. This is unexpected as the notes we were given during beta testing indicated that the disk had to be GPT.

Ian

Ian wrote: This is unexpected as the notes we were given during beta testing indicated that the disk had to be GPT.

All my own drives are MBR where the only limitation I understood from the Beta program was that this caused the Survival Kit to use the Linux rescue media version, whereas if the drive was GPT, it would use the WinPE version.

Personally, I just use the MVP Custom WinPE builder script and it happily creates WinPE media in the 2GB partition of the drive.

Michael, if your 4TB drive is using MBR, then you can create a second 2TB partition in the remaining unallocated space, or else the drive could be converted to GPT.

I checked and it is MBR with what appears to be the Linux rescue version.  So you’re saying if I download and run the MVP Custom WinPE builder script, I can replace the current rescue version with a WinPE version?

Yes, the key requirement is that the 2GB partition has a drive letter to allow it to be picked as the target for creating the MVP WinPE media.  The MVP script can use either the WinRE (Recovery Environment) on your computer, or else will require that you install the Windows 10 ADK (to provide the WinPE components).

After installing Win7 AIK, I go to assign a drive letter to the 2Gb partition and it's greyed out in Computer Management and doesn't show up as a volume from the command line.  I opened up in Disk Director and it's a hidden FAT32 and assign drive letter is not available.  Do I need to unhide it?

Michael, have you tried just ejecting the whole drive then reconnecting it again.  When I do this on my own drive, it automatically gets drive letters assigned to both the FAT32 and NTFS partitions.

If you want to create your own here then do this:

• First give the disk a name that you can remember - File Explorer, right click on the drive, select Properties, enter name in the General tab.
• Look in Windows Disk Management and make note of the Disk number of the drive you just named.
• Open an admin command prompt and type diskpart, press enter
• Once diskpart loads type list disk - press enter and verify that the Disk number you noted in Disk Management matches the Disk number and size in diskpart.
• Once confirmed type select disk # where # is the Disk number of the removable drive- press enter.
• You will get confirmation the disk # is now the selected disk.
• Now type clean - press enter
• You will get a confirmation that the disk has been successfully cleaned.

Now that all formatting has been removed use Disk Management to create a small 2GB partition formatted FAT32 at the beginning of the disk.

After that format the rest of the space NTFS/GPT if the remaining space is greater than 2 TB.

Now run the MVP tool and point it at the drive letter assigned to the 2GB partition you created on the disk.

After that completes you will have your boot partition.

Next you can create backup images to the remaining large portion of the disk.

Now you can boot the FAT323 partition with WinPE/RE and work with the4 backups on the rest of the disk.

It seems to me that dedicating an entire drive to the Acronis Survival Kit is wasteful. If your full backup is 800MB, you'll want to use a 1TB drive. Of course, that's neither huge nor expensive these days; so if you have one kicking around, it might make sense.

If you are of the mindset to practice having backups stored in multiple locations with one of those location being off site this is a useful device. 

For sake of clarity, you do not have to dedicate the USB HDD for use as Survival Kit. The "data" partition can be used to store whatever you want. However, such additional uses may undermine the integrity of the survival kit.

Yes, USB HDDs have commoditised. There seems to be flag-fall included with the smaller drives, for example 1TB, with additional TB being relatively much cheaper. Amazon sells 2.5" WD Elements 1 TB drive for US$63, 2TB for USA=$73.

Ian

In my case I have a 2Tb C: drive half full.  I have several VMs with different OS’s used for testing and a lot off applications, so though the new 4Tb I had laying around was a bit of overkill, a 2Tb would be just right.

A couple of observations going through this process, thanks Enchantech for the tips!  First the MVP script doesn’t work well with Win7.  It hung repeatedly on a findstr command validating the Drive letter to place the boot image, but once I got past that manually it works quite well, provided you install the Win10 ADK and not the Win7 one.  

The other thing I  noticed is that though the Acronis Survival Kit did a good job making the 4Tb backup drive work, because it only uses MBR it leaves a 2Tb chunk of drive unusable.   Unless of course you convert it to GPT.  

Michael,

Glad to hear yo got it working.  Not sure why you had problems with Win 7, something that might need looking at. 

The reason the Survival Kit works as it does is that it determines what the format of the current Windows install is on the machine creating the Kit.  If it is an MBR disk then it creates an MBR boot partition on the Kit.  If it is GPT then it creates a GPT boot partition.  This happens so that the Kit will boot on the machine which created it!

In the near future the Legacy Bios MBR is going to loose support in favor of UEFI/GPT.  At that stage you will need to be onboard with the new standard or always be faced with workarounds, if even possible!

H, a question about survival kit. Is this scenario possible:  Using a 2 GB external drive, create the bootable survival kit. Then, add full backup files, one for each of my 3 computers, to the drive. For recovery, boot the survival drive on any of the 3 computers, and select the appropriate full backup for that particular drive? Or, is the survival kit limited to the computer it was created with?

Thanks

William Porter, the Survival Kit is not limited to the PC it was created with so your scenario is possible. Just make sure you test the bootability of the media on all the 3 PCs in advance, just to be sure that WinPE media boots normally.

William wrote: Using a 2 GB external drive, create the bootable survival kit.

I trust that you meant a 2 TB external drive here as ATI uses 2 GB for the Survival Kit partition...!

 Yes, a 2 TB external. From what I picked up in this discussion, I'll clean & initialize it GPT before starting, just in case. When finished, I'll test it out with another spare drive installed in one of the computers. I like the concept. 

Thank you for the quick replies

Yes the survival kit can be used on multiple PCs. You can also make one with both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the recovery media. You have to set this up in the options, it is on the right most TAB somewhere. Using my iPad at moment so cannot confirm exact setting.

Ian

Personally, I have 7 computers.  3 of them boot UEFI/GPT.  The other 4 boot Legacy/MBR.  I plan on using 2 drives probably 2TB each.  I will create one Survival Kit booting UEFI on 1 drive and create Legacy boot on the other.

I will then make fresh backups of my computers to my NAS server, then copy them to the drives they belong on.  When Microsoft releases the next major upgrade I will again create fresh backups to my NAS, then perform the upgrades.

If all goes well I can then create fresh backups to my NAS then copy those to the drives as needed.  This should allow for 3 backups of each system on the 2 drives plus the same on my NAS.

I will also do periodic backups to local disks on each machine as well.  I am not giving up my bootable Recovery Media however, that I will always have handy!

I have a question,

How long should it take for 2019 to make a survival kit on a 5tb drive with the source drives having 215 gigs of data on them?

Brian Courtis wrote:

I have a question,

How long should it take for 2019 to make a survival kit on a 5tb drive with the source drives having 215 gigs of data on them?

So far all it is doing is resizing partition and has not appeared to make any progress for some time

Brian, there are 2 actions for when creating a Survival Kit on your 5TB drive.

The first action is to create a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the beginning of the drive, which in turn requires that that 2GB space be taken from the existing partition space on the drive.  The time to do this will depend on what needs to be done to clear that 2GB on the 5TB drive, so the resizing will involve moving data before the partition can be created.

If you have a lot of existing files or a large amount of data already present, then the time taken can be significant.

The second action is to run the ATI Backup task where you were offered this option to create the Survival Kit, so the time needed for this action really depends on the Source data size and the type of backup, options chosen etc.

The drive is empty I formatted it and made it gpt but it was taking over an hour and no progress was made so I canceled the operation I don't know how long it should take but I believe that it should not have taken that long. I am now making a backup and then going to make a rescue disk 

Update 12.08 pm

It has taken less than 30 minutes to back up  both disks 

the size of the back up is 110 GB but the backup data was an about 216 GB is the back up compressed?

Please note that True Image works at a very low disk level.  Processing the file system, and physical disk media on a 5TB drive will be long process.  How long is hard to say as there are many factors involved.

The creation of a backup file and creating Rescue Media is going to be faster for sure in this scenario. 

If you think the Survival Kit creation process stopped working or stalled (not responding) then this would indicate a issue somewhere in the process.  I would think there are only a few problems that might trigger such a issue.  One of those would be that an error on disk (physical or within the filesystem itself) is the cause.

I let the process run for almost 2 hours it had been an hour and a half since I saw any movement on the progress bar and it never gave me a time it simply said computing time I think. This was a completely fresh install of windows and my Adobe and Microsoft Products only other things installed were drivers and codex and Acronis. The set up  I am using is a gigabyte  z170x Gaming G1 board with an Intel 6700k CPU I have 64 GB of memory and am running win 10 Pro. My first drive is a Samsung 500 GB 850 SSD and the second drive is a WD Blue 7200rpm 2 Tb Drive the external is a WD 5 Tb usb3.0 drive that is brand new and formatted for GPT I did not know how long it should take but I did know I could do a complete back up and clone both disks as I have actually done in less time than it was taking  for the progress bar to move. I am not saying it was not working. I was trying to see if anyone knew how long it would take so I would have a better idea of when to schedule it on my other identical 5Tb WD drive 

Thank you both for your replies as I do appreciate them very much

Just a guess here but had a post some time back with a similar issue.  Turned out to be a bad USB cable, (they were using a cheap knockoff from Amazon) that was running slower than a USB 2.0 one would.  Might be worth looking into here as well.

Steve Smith wrote:

Uwe, if your external drive is working fine with your MBR system then do not try to convert it to GPT as this is not needed.

The Survival Kit is just an automated method of doing what is already possible with any removable drive, i.e. create a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the beginning of the drive then write the ATI Rescue Media to that partition.

If you use a partition tool such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can do this yourself and the MVP Custom ATIPE Builder script will use the FAT32 partition as the target provided it has a drive letter allocated to it.  I have done this myself on a couple of drives and it works well.

There should be no need to recreate all your ATI backups on the drive.

I already have a backup of my GPT system to a GPT external USB drive. If I create a 2GB partition like what survival kit uses, will that be used by the survival kit creation process, or will it still need to do a complete drive erase before creation? I just like how the convenience of survival kit and would update any recovery files if need be on each successive connection.

I already have a backup of my GPT system to a GPT external USB drive. If I create a 2GB partition like what survival kit uses, will that be used by the survival kit creation process, or will it still need to do a complete drive erase before creation? I just like how the convenience of survival kit and would update any recovery files if need be on each successive connection.

Scott, if your external drive is already in an acceptable format then the Survival Kit process should not need to reformat the drive.

I don't use the Survival Kit process myself but achieve the same result by using the MVP Custom ATI PE Builder tool to write to my manually created 2GB FAT32 partition - the key proviso is that it needs to have a drive letter allocated to give to the builder script.  The same will work with the normal Acronis Rescue Media builder program.

Steve Smith wrote:

Scott, if your external drive is already in an acceptable format then the Survival Kit process should not need to reformat the drive.

I don't use the Survival Kit process myself but achieve the same result by using the MVP Custom ATI PE Builder tool to write to my manually created 2GB FAT32 partition - the key proviso is that it needs to have a drive letter allocated to give to the builder script.  The same will work with the normal Acronis Rescue Media builder program.

Thanks @Steve. Although I already had your MVP Acronis rescue on a separate USB stick. I like the idea of all-in-one, plus any updates to the rescue files will be auto-updated, as I understand it. I successfully added the 'survival kit' to my existing drive.