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Recovery plan for backup from 3 source drives

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Hi all,

I have recently returned to ATI19 after a few years away.  I trying to create an excellent backup and recovery plan at a time when I am problem free.

On page 146 of the ATI19 manual in pdf format,

11.3 Making sure that your bootable media can be used when needed:

I like the excellent advice to make a "test recovery" on pp146-148.  I note the suggestion that the recovery be made to a new (meaning unused, non-essential) disk, which seems like a good precaution. 

My computer is organized with Windows, program files, and all the essential files that make everything run smoothly on SSD Drive: C, with 500 GB capacity.  Most of my data is on internal HDD Drive D, with 1 TB capacity.  Because I am a photographer, all my image files are on Drive: I, a large 8 TB drive

As I went through the exercise, it appeared that I would be able to recover my daily Acronis incremental backup that includes all 3 of these drives.  However, for each of the source drives in the backup, I am asked to pick a new destination drive.  As soon as I choose one, it gets formatted as a preparatory step, and after it has been used to recover, say, the C: Drive, it is now unavailable for duty as a destination for the D: and I: Drive recoveries, even though it has huge capacity.

One additional wrinkle is that the I: Drive has a large 8 TB capacity, although I only use a few hundred GB of that capacity now.  It seemed to me that some of the recovery messages were suggesting I needed an 8TB or larger drive to recover to, so I skipped the I: Drive recovery exercise altogether.

So, I wonder if any of you have simple solutions.  I hate to buy 3 additional spare drives to have around simply for a recovery that may never be needed. 

A couple ideas I had:

1. Partition the I:Drive to include a smaller "active partition", gradually increasing in size as photo files grow in number, then try to restore only this smaller partition.  I can't really tell if True Image's recovery rules makes that step important.

2. On the destination drive for this recovery, create 3 partitions, one each for the C,D, and I drive backups.

In years past, I simply recovered directly onto the original source drives, hoping for the best.  As I get older and wiser, that seems like a reckless plan now, and I do like the idea of recovering to a new drive as an intermediate step.

This is a great forum.  Thanks for any thoughts members may have.

Leander

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Leander,

Welcome to the Forum,

In my opinion the real advantage and need for a new intermediate drive recovery as a test is for you Primary Windows OS C: drive.  So it looks to me like if you had another 500GB SSD to recover the Windows OS drive to, you could then after doing so, swap it out in place of the current drive C: and see if it boots.  

For your other drives what I would suggest is that you use Explorer to mount the backups of these drives and then copy-paste a few files to a temp location.  If that works then chances are excellent that recovery would be fine.

It is wise to have more than one backup of all data.  An external drive is great for this purpose.  In fact as cheap as HDD are right now get a couple of them and duplicate your backups to them.  Keeping one of these off site is recommended.  Having a third backup to cloud storage is also a good idea.  That is a slow process at this point but one worth doing so as to have a fail safe in place for your data.

Thank you, Enchantech.  That is exactly the kind of help I was hoping for.  I will give all you ideas a try.  Seem sensible and I hope easy.

Thanks,

Leander