Confused how to perform a recovery with 2020
Ok folks, bear with me please as I am very new to all this and don't really know what I'm doing!
Following a right old mess when upgrading from windows 7 to windows 10, I decided it was time to implement some sort of back up strategy.
To that end I have purchased and installed the "one time purchase" version of 2020 on my windows 10 pro home pc.
I have a 225Gb internal SSD as my C(system drive) and the old internal 500Gb hdd drive as my D drive for storing all my documents, music, photographs etc. I have 2 external USB drives which I intend to use as the backup destinations each identical, so that I have 2 copies of everything in case one fails. I am also trialling the cloud storage as an off site backup destination.
So far I have carried out test whole PC backups to my external "H" drive which is a USB3 1TB Seagate HDD. I have done a few backups over the last few weeks and as you can see from the screenshot(1) (Hopefully), 3 of them are shown under the backup tab. Not sure why there are 2 shown for "H" drive as I thought the older one would have been replaced by the newer one.
So having successfully created 1 backup - or so I thought, over the last few days, I decided to try my 2 backups plan.
I made a whole pc backup to my 2nd external "G" Drive (and also created the first aid recovery thingy on the drive as prompted) which is a WD Passport 300GB USB 2 HDD. this also appeared to go well as 2020 reported success. See screenshot (2) for the activity report, and it showed up in the backups tab of 2020. I then proceeded to make the 2nd backup - this time to the "H" drive. This appeared to be successful, but this is where my problems start. the "G" drive backup no longer shows under the backups tab(see screenshot 1) and if I look under the Recovery tab it is empty with the message "NO DATA TO RECOVER YET" create your first backup to see its contents here (See screenshot 3).
So can anyone with a lot of patience explain to me what I am doing wrong, and how to implement my plan correctly please.
Hi Steve,
thank-you so much for responding to my plea, and so quickly!
I thought when I created the first backup, that was the end of that task, and creating the second backup would be the second task. I guess from what you are saying this is not the case. I’m afraid I don’t know how to achieve what you are suggesting regarding separate tasks, could you elaborate please in terms a troglodyte might understand. Many thanks for your patience.
John, please see the attached zipped video of the process to create 2 backup files - you will need to repeat the same but selecting your different backup drives (G: & H:) as appropriate for the task.
Hmm, looks like file upload has stopped working!
Please see this shared link:
Sorry, where is the zipped video?
John, click on the shared link in my last post. I tried to add it as a zip file attachment but this isn't working for me today for some reason?!!
Hi again
I've watched the video, and think I have set up the 2 tasks correctly. before I try and create new backups, should I frmat the 2 USB drives to remove any backups on them from previous attempts?
John, before you format the two USB drives, make sure you have removed the old backup task from the ATI GUI task list first, this should remove most if not all of the files for you. Also, rather than format the drives, just delete the files in Explorer after the old task is gone. Formatting the drive might require you to reselect the Destination for the 2 new tasks because the drive has a new partition identifier due to being formatted.
In the GUI, click on the caret to the right of the old task name, then select Delete from the drop-down menu shown, followed by clicking on the 'Delete entirely' option.
Note: If you are able to connect your 2 USB drives when doing the above delete, then that will allow ATI to find all the files that it created on those drives to be able to delete them.
Hi again Steve. Thanks very much for your advice. I now have the back up tasks in place and have successfully created my 2 identical backups to separate drives, and both show up in the backup and recovery tabs. I did encounter a few problems en route, at one point I was seeing duplicate G and H drives in windows explorer, but I managed to fix that as it appeared to be a windows 10 issue. Also when I deleted the previous backup versions I got a message saying a .tibx file for each drive had not been deleted but I couldn't locate the files and stop them perhaps causing issues later I formatted both drives anyway and uninstalled/reinstalled ATI2020 prior to creating the new tasks. 1 anomaly I noticed was that neither backup gave me the option to create a survival kit on the destination drive this time - any thoughts? Is it something I can still do another way?
Anyway thanks again for your help.
1 anomaly I noticed was that neither backup gave me the option to create a survival kit on the destination drive this time - any thoughts? Is it something I can still do another way?
John, if you have used the option to create a Survival Kit for these drives previously, then it may simply be that it still exists.
The easiest method of checking is to open Windows Disk Management and then look at each of the drives to see if it has a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the start with the name Acronis HM?
When you reformatted the drive, you would only have been formatting the remaining NTFS partition, not the Survival Kit one.
hi Steve,
There is a 2GB partition at the start of each USB drive, but neither has a name or drive letter, just its size and
Healthy (Active primary partition). Is that it? do I need to give it some sort of designation?
I also have Acronis start up recovery manager activated, will that play nicely with the survival kit, and which should be used when? sorry for all the questions.
John, if your drives have a 2GB partition then I suspect that this will be the Survival Kit one, but the only real way to confirm this would be to try booting from it.
The ASRM is a different feature which still uses an older, limited Linux kernel OS if you press the F11 key on boot. Personally, I have not used ASRM for many years and see no point in having it as if your OS boot drive fails, then so does ASRM as it lives on that same drive.
If you want to test your Survival Kit, then hold down the Shift key then click on Restart in Windows, then when you see the panel (below), click on 'Use a device' then pick your external USB drive to boot from. If all is OK it will boot into the WinPE Acronis offline application.
I gave that a go, and got to the choose an option screen, but the "Use a device" option wasn't there, so I guess that means the survival kit is not in the 2GB partition.
John, when you looked in Disk Management, did the 2GB partition show as FAT32 formatted?
If it is, then select it then take the option to give it a drive letter.
Once you have given the FAT32 partition a drive letter, you can look to see what is contained in the partition.
You would also be able to use the normal Acronis Rescue Media Builder tool to create the media in that partition by giving it the drive letter of the partition.
Note: my F: partition shown above is the equivalent of a survival kit but using a 32GB partition as I have it setup to boot from multiple different applications besides ATI.
As you can see from the screenshot it doesn't show as FAT32 or NTFS. clicking on it gives no options either.
John, I would suggest clicking on the 2GB partition and taking the Format option then choosing FAT32, followed by giving it a drive letter.
That doesn't appear to be an option, as the only choice not greyed out after right clicking the drive is "Delete volume".
John, I can only suggest taking the Delete option then creating the 2GB FAT32 partition again along with allocating it a drive letter. The alternative would be to delete all the volumes on the H: drive then reformatting it as NTFS and running the 'Create Survival Kit' option again, but this would also delete your current backups on that drive.
Ok. I deleted the 2GB volume, and formatted the backup partition. went back into acronis and re selected the relevant task. This time I was given the option of creating the survival kit which I did and backed up system again all seems to have been successful, however the 2GB partition still has no identifier associated with it, but im not going to sweat over that, the kit creation reported as successful. repeated the process for the secondry back up also successfully, so hopefully everything is good. Thanks again for your efforts.
By default, there is no label or drive letter - it's an unmounted (hidden) partition. You should be able to give it a drive letter now, if you want. Not really necessary though as there shouldn't be much need to modify anything on it manually (for most people).
The main thing, is testing to make sure you can boot to it from your bios (use the bios one time boot menu to manually boot it.) Also, take note of how your OS is installed in Windows (instructions: https://www.eightforums.com/threads/bios-mode-see-if-windows-boot-in-uefi-or-legacy-mode.29504/). If/when recovering with rescue media, if your motherboard supports legacy and UEFI booting, you want to boot the rescue media in the same mode the OS was originally installed for the best chance of bootability after the restore.