Backup booted from Windows or CD...best practice?
Obviously the program is intended to work making an image of the drive from which it is booted, and I guess most people do this.
But my gut feel is that best practice is to make the image while booted from the Acronis rescue CD, with the drive being imaged completely unmounted.
What are the experts views? is it worthwhile booting from CD to backup?
Thanks
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Many of us create backups both from the CD and from within Windows.
Via Windows is considerable quicker but since a system backup should be restored via the CD, it makes a lot sense to also have spare backups created and validated via the CD.
I personally use both methods but for me, the backups via the CD is like "Plan B" whereas backup via Windows is "Plan A" and both are necessary.
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I always backup from Windows, and restore from the CD.
Doing one backup from the CD is a good to way to test it and get familiar with it.
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It seems to me that backing up the system volume (the only volume I image) from within Windows has to incur more risk, where there's a slew of Acronis services/drivers at play, not to mention Windows' VSS.
Booting up into the Recovery CD's Linux environment gets the job done without any of that risk-potential. I don't argue that backing up from the CD is likely slower than from inside Windows, but I'll trade speed for reliability any day!
Aaron
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Thanks very much everybody.
I am in the prefer-reliability-to-speed camp, so will probably mostly do it from the CD.
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One reason the CD is safer is that you are using the environment that also gets used when a restore of the active partition is required and it is used whether you start the restore in Windows or not. In this way you are ensuring it works on the machine each time. OTOH, once you confirm that the Linux recovery environment works on your machine or the live-imaging within Windows works, the difference is very little. Problems related to live-imaging tend to be few and almost all of them are reported at the initial stage of testing the program, not that it worked and now it doesn't. Yes, you should retest on every update but that applies to the CD as well.
There is an advantage to the Windows live-imaging related to how we humans behave rather than technical - convenience and possibly speed. This means I'm more likely to make an image before trying some new software which might well keep me out of other troubles.
I use live-imaging all the time with no problems.
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