Is True Image suitable for restoring individual files from local backups?

Tom,

My advise would be to use Windows File Explorer to mount the backup file as a drive.  You can then drill down to the needed files and copy and paste them as needed.  In my experience this is much quicker.

Hello Tom,

In addition to Bob's advice you can also double-click the backup file in Windows Explorer and also browse through files and/or copy/paste them.

Many thanks to both of you for your help.

I tried double-clicking the .tib. It took about 8 minutes and after that, the options to Open or Explorer didn't do anything. I had tried this before with the previous version and decided it wasn't a feasible solution; perhaps with smaller files it might be.

Unfortunately I was no more successful mounting the .tib file as a drive. The option doesn't appear in the Windows Explorer right-click context menu. The TIB Mounter service is running. The disk is NTFS. It seems as if reinstalling might be the next step. I've upgraded a few times  - eg from v17 to 18 and now to 19. Perhaps I should do an uninstall first.

Tom, is this a disk or a file backup? If you have a file-level backup, you cannot mount it.

Thanks Renata. I'm using the BACKUP tab in ATI 2019, choosing folders from c: drive, and choosing an external drive for the target drive, using the Incremental option. I assume this is a file-level backup, in which case you've explained the problem.

To create a backup which is easily and quickly searchable (like the online version), would I have to use the Clone Disk tool and mount the cloned disk? I only use option this occasionally and keep the backup away from the computer.

Acronis Cloud presumably does a file-level backup and yet is searchable. I assumed there would be a similar option in the desktop backup. If this isn't the case, I probably need to use an alternative solution for local backups.

Tom, if you are making Files & Folders backup images, then you can just double-click on these files in File Explorer which will open up the archive and allow you to browse the contents, including using Copy & Paste as needed.

If you want to be able to Mount a backup image to a new drive letter (aka as a virtual drive) then you would need to make a Disk & Partitions backup image instead, as the partition layout is needed to allow mounting.

Thanks Steve. I tried double-clicking the .tib file and it took a long time about 8 minutes to process before the Open/Explore options appeared (and then they didn't seem to respond).

I've just a made a small backup (175MB) and I see what you meant: double-clicking the file opens it up almost instantly and I can navigate through the folder structure. The one I tried earlier was 165GB; there doesn't seem a feasible way of searching/restoring individual files to restore them with a backup this size.

I think I'll either to have to make a series of smaller backups or use some alternative software. Ideally I would just like the local backup to function like the online version - so I can backup all my files and search through them quickly to restore individual files when I need to.

Tom, where exactly are your backups being stored here?  This can influence the time needed to open an archive after double-clicking on it in Explorer, also the depth of folders in the backup in terms of nesting.

I just double-clicked on a local 46GB .tib image file and it opened in a couple of seconds, this on my old Intel Core 2 Duo laptop which is not exactly the highest spec!

Tom, I have some "Files and folders" backups taken to a USB 3.0 attached external drive.  I, too, experience a delay when I access files in the backups, but my delays are much shorter than yours: 20-30 seconds rather than 8-10 minutes.  That same delay is repeated for most directory levels I have to drill down through. The amount of delay seems to depend on the number of Incr files in the backup.  And (wild speculation here) it may also depend on the number of files and levels of directories.  I have a bit over 33,000 files and almost 2000 directories.  Most of the files are 4 directory levels down.  I think my greatest depth is 6 levels with only a handful of files at that depth.  I suspect I would have much faster access if I had a flatter directory structure ... although 4-6 directory levels is actually pretty flat.

I have no idea how ATI works internally, but it in creating a directory tree for Windows Explorer to explore, it must process some representation of the directory tree from the full and each incr (or full and the last diff) backup.  I can believe this would be very slow for a cloud-based backup.

Steve, the file is stored on an external drive, via USB3. The computer is a few years old, but has a Core i7-3770 processor and 16GB RAM. I shall try it on a new computer in a few days and see if that helps. I expect the nesting goes quite deep in some folders but is generally probably nothing unusual.

Patrick, I don't know exactly how many files there are in the backup, but there are 1.5 million on the drive I'm backing up, and I'm backing more or less everything except the Windows and Program Files folders - so there are probably quite a lot more than in your case.

If you're experiencing additional delays as you drill down the folder structure - and that's typical (and likely to be rather worse in my case) - I suspect the answer to my question (the subject of the post) is 'no'.

I think the only way the searching would be satisfactory (to satisfy my lack of patience anyway), would be if there were some sort of index which was used to locate folders/files. Also, I would prefer not to navigate through a folder structure to find files. I rarely do this even when I'm locating files on local drives (ie not backups).

It's strange that the Cloud version is so much faster; I would have thought it would be much slower. I think some sort of index must be used (apart from the file sytem). It's a pity the same performance doesn't apply to both.

I don't experience this behavior at all, I have a backup that is 451 GB (484,740,317,184 bytes) and it opens seemingly instantaneously, see linked gif for example.

https://imgur.com/ZTzmbek

Edit: Doesn't seem the forum uploads support a gif, so I linked it from imgur instead.

Thank Raymond - that's certainly very quick. Perhaps the issue is that the drive (in my case) is external, connected via USB.