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Are boot drive mirrors made from within Windows reliable?

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Being rather "old school" and remembering all the problems with older utilities not properly backing up the boot drive due to changing and locked files, I'm wondering how Acronis handles this.

In short, if I run Acronis within Windows and tell it to back up my C: drive, will it get everything so that I will be able to fully restore the boot drive later on and have it boot up without any missing files?

Thanks. :)

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Charles,
I too am a member of the "old school" and still make occasional images booted from the bootable media CD but for 99'% of my backups and restores, I use images made from within Windows and every image is validated.

I have made numerous restore from Windows disk images and rarely ever have an issue. All my restores are from the CD.

I understand your concern and I have a little of the same which is why I use both methods. If the Windows TI backup has an issue (which is very very rare), then I always have a backup available made from the CD.

Thanks, Grover.

The thing with the CD method is that it requires shutting down Windows, which I like to do only when I have to. So maybe I'll keep doing that periodically, and just run the one within Windows automatically every night or whatever. If the Windows one doesn't work, I can fall back to the CD backup.

Charles:

Acronis and other imaging solutions that operate while Windows is active are able to create a "point-in-time" backup. The image file created is complete at the instant the backup starts. Subsequent read and write operations that occur after the image creation process starts are not included in the image.

There is a description of this process in this article: http://forum.acronis.com/content/1512