Skip to main content

Acronis True Image for XP Pro?

Thread needs solution

I recently had a hard drive crash. Everything lost. I'm looking for software able to do bare-metal full backup and restore. From what I've read Acronis True Image 2016 was the last that supported my OS, and it had 'limitations', those being 'new features'. So far as I can tell, it is no longer available for download. Before I move on to other software, I wanted to confirm this, and ask a question:
Does Acronis currently have anything to offer a user of Windows XP by way of bare-metal backup, and if so, does it include the 'Acronis Universal Restore'?
Thanks.

1 Users found this helpful

Chris, welcome to these public User Forums.

ATI is fully capable of doing bare metal full backups and restores, doing so by booting the computer from standalone rescue media for this purpose.

Support for Windows XP is getting harder to find with the longer period that OS has been out of all mainstream support by Microsoft, with Windows 7 to follow on very soon!

ATI 2019 was the last ATI version that mentioned having been tested on Windows XP SP3 in the list of supported operating systems, but I am sure that there have been posts in the forums from users with XP and ATI 2020.  The key disadvantage for XP users is simply that they cannot take full use of all the features provided with the latest versions of ATI, and with ATI 2020, that Acronis have done no testing of this version with any XP systems, so will not guarantee that it will continue to work without issues!

That said, your question about bare-metal operations negates the questions around what OS any version of ATI supports, and brings this back to a question of the hardware involved.

ATI rescue media comes in 3 different 'flavours' with the oldest being based on a small BusyBox Linux kernel, followed by 2 versions of Windows PE media, one based on the Windows Recovery Environment and the other created using the Windows AIK or ADK tools.  Of these, the first is the one most likely to work for your older Win XP hardware.

The rescue media is capable of working with either 32-bit or 64-bit systems, and in both Legacy and UEFI boot modes.

Acronis Universal Restore is provided with all current versions of ATI but is only required when actually migrating an installed OS to different hardware that includes the motherboard, CPU etc.  It is not needed for changing a disk drive.

I would recommend taking a 30-day Trial of ATI 2020 to check out how it works for you.
See KB 2768: Trial version limitations of Acronis products for what can / can't be done with trial software.

@Chris, did you ever try running Steve's suggested Linux-based Acronis Restore bootable-media?

I am looking into taking a backup of our old XP computers, but of course need to know if the restore works, and whether I should also prepare a bootable media for them right now (before that is obsoleted as well!).

 

Thanks,

-- Demis

Demis, welcome to these public User Forums.

Do you have access to any version of Acronis True Image to use with your XP computers?

If not, then an alternative might be to try Clonezilla which has been around for a very long time.

I own Acronis True Image 2020 (5 seats), and yesterday tried installing on Win XP Pro, but it didn’t appear to install properly. 
the installer completed with no errors, but didn’t launch Acronis when it was done. 
I tried to launch manually from the .exe and got “missing DLL” errors.

So I thus searched the web for compatibility issues, leading me here. 

Demis, if you have ATI 2020 already installed on another PC, then try creating the Advanced > Linux version of the rescue media and try booting your XP PC from this.

As stated earlier in this topic, ATI 2019 is the last version that still supported install on XP so would suspect that changes in ATI 2020 now introduce requirements that XP can't provide.

You could try installing the oldest build version of 2020 from your Acronis Account download page (my page shows build #21400 from Sept 2019 as the oldest which is 3 levels back) to see if that makes any difference, otherwise you would need an older version and license / serial key.