Acronis True Image and WinRE partitions
I have a problem with a Windows-7 PC that I need to backup in case of hardware disaster or (more likely?) malware attacks.
The PC has a single physical hard drive, which contains a C: partition and a WinRE partition.
Windows-7 built-in imaging is unable to create an image of the disk as there is insufficient space on the WinRE disk partition for whatever workfiles the process uses. And Windows-7 insists on backing up this partition at the same time as C:, so nothing can be saved. Thank-you Windows.
Will Acronis True Image have the same problem?
If you use the Acronis Bootable Media disk to perform a Full Disk Mode backup to a secondary drive attached in some manner to the system you should not have issue in creating a backup.
If you use the Acronis Bootable Media disk to perform a Full Disk Mode backup to a secondary drive attached in some manner to the system you should not have issue in creating a backup.
You do not have to use the bootable media for this as it can be done equally well from Acronis running in Windows.
The backup was (or would have been had Windows System Image worked) being sent to an external USB drive - but Windows insists on having a certain amount of free space *on* any partition that it is backing up. I don't why - it may be a requirement of shadow copy, which I assume Windows must be using to allow a backup to work while the system is up and running?
The question then is, does Acronis need to use a similar mechanism if backing up while Windows is still up and running? If it does it may well fail in the same manner.
If you use the Acronis Bootable Media disk to perform a Full Disk Mode backup to a secondary drive attached in some manner to the system you should not have issue in creating a backup.
You do not have to use the bootable media for this as it can be done equally well from Acronis running in Windows.
Correct, you do not have to use the boot media to perform the suggested backup. The problem is OP has limited disk space and therefore the temp files that are necessary and created by Windows and Acronis to perform backup routines fail because not enough disk space is available to do so.
Thus my suggestion implies that running from the boot media would work as these temp files would be created in system RAM not on phsical drive space and therefore would succeed.
If you use the Acronis Bootable Media disk to perform a Full Disk Mode backup to a secondary drive attached in some manner to the system you should not have issue in creating a backup.
You do not have to use the bootable media for this as it can be done equally well from Acronis running in Windows.
Correct, you do not have to use the boot media to perform the suggested backup. The problem is OP has limited disk space and therefore the temp files that are necessary and created by Windows and Acronis to perform backup routines fail because not enough disk space is available to do so.
Thus my suggestion implies that running from the boot media would work as these temp files would be created in system RAM not on phsical drive space and therefore would succeed.
Bob -
From what you say, Acronis and Windows are going to work the same way when running an "online" backup? I guess then your suggestion of going for the offline backup will be the only way possible on this particular PC (I don't want to go down the route of trying to resize the WinRE partition, therein lies disaster methinks!).
Is the offline backup (and restore) reasonably intuitive? I did see a review somewhere that said while the latest-n-greatest online interface is very slick, the offline one might be a bit "nerdy".
Does restore allow one to (logically) format the disk to match the backup being used?
Good questions,
It is my opinion that in performing a system image backup which is what I believe you are wanting to do here, that process has a much more unlikely chance of being corrupt or failing when using the bootable media instead of a Windows active session. My reasoning is that when performing a system image backup from boot media you are doing so without using the installed disk in what can be called LIVE mode your LIVE session is entirely within RAM so hard disk access is performed to basically an inactive disk. That in turn means that no other read/write access will occur while the backup operation is performed. This in turn greatly reduces the chance for corruption of the resulting image.
The word "nerdy" I find to be highly subjective and reflects only the opinion of the author as to the boot media interface. One must keep in mind that the app is running on bare bones support levels so when viewed on the high resolution monitors of today appears grainy. Maybe this bothered the author. The interface itself is quite intuative and should not be a problem for most users to navigate or use.
I suggest since you are unfamiliar with the boot media interface you read the online documentation for it and your particular backup requirements so that navigation is not a problem. It does operate somewhat differently than the installed windows version so some procedures differ between applications.
Good questions,
It is my opinion that in performing a system image backup which is what I believe you are wanting to do here, that process has a much more unlikely chance of being corrupt or failing when using the bootable media instead of a Windows active session. My reasoning is that when performing a system image backup from boot media you are doing so without using the installed disk in what can be called LIVE mode your LIVE session is entirely within RAM so hard disk access is performed to basically an inactive disk. That in turn means that no other read/write access will occur while the backup operation is performed. This in turn greatly reduces the chance for corruption of the resulting image.
The word "nerdy" I find to be highly subjective and reflects only the opinion of the author as to the boot media interface. One must keep in mind that the app is running on bare bones support levels so when viewed on the high resolution monitors of today appears grainy. Maybe this bothered the author. The interface itself is quite intuative and should not be a problem for most users to navigate or use.
I suggest since you are unfamiliar with the boot media interface you read the online documentation for it and your particular backup requirements so that navigation is not a problem. It does operate somewhat differently than the installed windows version so some procedures differ between applications.
OK, will do.
I too worry a little about "online" backups, but I guess Microsoft must have the Shadow Volume thing fairly well sorted. I've certainly used an image produced that way to restore my own PC from and all went well as far as I can tell, though of course I might just have been lucky ;)
Actually, since I've just noticed that Acronis offer a free trial version, I guess suck-it-and-see might be the best thing for me to do. I'll report back!
Just make certain you perform a Disk Mode backup and Disk Mode restore. You should have no problem if done in this manner.
B Shaw,
Your feeling that the problem has to do with the shadow copy function is correct. Microsoft's VSS service is used for this. It needs space on each volume to store the shadow copy of that volume. I experienced the exact same problem with Acronis Backup & Recovery when it was set to use Microsoft's VSS. I pinned it down to the Recovery partition by backing up one partition at a time. Using the Acronis provided VSS, the full disk backup succeeded with a warning that shodow copies were not created. Using Acronis' snapshot manager (fltsrv.sys and snapman.sys) the full disk backup succeeded with no warnings.
The good news for you is that TI only uses the Acronis snapshot manager. You should have no problem with full disk backups made from within Windows.