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unallocated sectors

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What are the risks of not backing up unallocated space with a sector-by-sector backup on Acronis True Image 2019?  Is there any possibility that a bare-metal recovery of the hard-disk drive would fail if the unallocated sectors are not backed up?

 

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2019/index.html#7961.html

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Nicole, there should be very little risk of not using sector-by-sector backup mode (with or without unallocated sectors being included), as this is the default mode for all backups.

The only time when this may be required would be where is some form of activation data stored in such unallocated sectors by an application but taking this approach would carry its own risks of such sectors being overwritten by new data stored in such sectors at a later time!

Personally, I cannot remember a time when I have used sector-by-sector mode for any backups unless this has been forced on me by virtue of ATI encountering bad sectors on the drive.

Ditto to Steve - it's rare that a sector-by-sector backup is warranted, needed or desired.  It's slower to backup, takes up more space for the backup and is slower to recover.  

The only time you really might need it (other than if it's forced into that mode due to bad sectors on the disk being detected), might be for records retention where data recovery of the unused sectors would be needed to do a deeper file recovery from previously deleted files. 

Those types of recoveries are usually a long shot as the disk is constantly being modified by new data, defrag runs, etc. but can be possible in ideal situations.  I doubt this type of sector by sector backup/restore would fly in legal scenario without some type of application certification of the sector-by-sector copy/restore method being an approved standard.  I'm sure there are software or even duplicator devices that have it, but probably cost a lot more than your typical home backup product.

Ultimately though, yeah, you don't need to do sector-by-sector in order to restore a bootable OS.

From my experience, you use "sector-by-sector" only when you have (a) unsupported encryption or operating system on the disk, (b) the imaging or cloning process fails, or the (c) corner case where you want an exact soft copy of a disk for research, experimentation, forensic instead of fiddling with the original disk.

It is also a UI/documentation issue, as "sector-by-sector" in an "advanced" section inspire confidence in something better ("exact copy", etc). Less advanced users are tempted to use it, creating all sort of restrictions on other features of the product. The UI/help section should specify the cases where this is required.