Difficulties restoring with True Image Home 2010 and its solution

This restore process was using the Rescue CD - attempt to perform a "bare metal" restore.

I was restoring a customer's computer which developed serious problems a few days before the end of the financial year and due to a virus and bad sectors appearing seriously threatened his reporting schedule for the authorities!

Not wanting to risk a complete collapse we decided to do a complete restore to a new hard disk. The bad story is that while we were trying to do that "in anger" it failed completely! I got onto chat support but the rep was not able to help me - which of course is an even worse story!

In desperation we decided to have to risk completing the financial reports with the failing disk and kept our fingers crossed it did not collapse. Fortunately it did not and he got his report away - phew!

With the heat off I had a close look at why the restore failed.

Well to cut to the chase the story is that Restore did not work as my simple minded expectations led me to expect. I had a look at the user guide and there was nothing in it to tell me otherwise.

What I had was an original full (disk/partition) backup done in 2008 and an incremental one before attempting the restore. When I made the restore process to "Proceed" after selecting the recent incremental backup the dialogue box showed both it and the original, which is what you would expect. The first sign that it wasn't right is that the program announced it had finished and succeeded in less than one second! With about 80 GB of data to restore there was no way that could be right and indeed when I looked at the disk there was nothing on it. The disk remained "uninitialised".

If I tried first initialising the disk the above process would promptly wipe it out and leave it uninitialised.

I was able to get real action action if I chose to restore files and folders from the backup files instead of the whole disk and partition. However, that method did not produce a bootable disk.

I should report here that the file and folder copying was agonisingly slow. That is something which should be fixed for future versions of the program.

That is when I went to the chat support line. The rep promised to get back to me but he still has not done so.

The solution:
Poking around, the "trick", if you can call it that, is to first restore from the original full backup file. THEN the restore process behaved as you would expect and produced a bootable disk. After that one would then perform a file and folders restore with the increment file(s) onto that restored volume overwriting duplicate filenames to bring the whole thing back to the present.

Object lessons:
1. That the restore did not process the original full and the associated increment properly tells me that is a bug in the restore program. So therefore please fix it.

2. improve the algorithm for the file and folder restore function so that it is much faster.

3. your support reps need to be brought up-to-speed with all the difficulties and quirks of the progam.

I need to add:
The original full backup was done by TI Home 2009 and the increment was, of course, done by the present TI Home 2010. I found that TI Home 2010 in some way modified the original tib file when the increment was produced which burned the bridge behind me so that I could not go back and use my TI 2009 Rescue CD to try to restore from that full backup file because it said it was "corrupt". This was most disconcerting under the circumstances. (Under that heated situation I did not think to try to restore from the full backup using TI2010).

You need to introduce better bad sector handling. When I tried to clone the disk the process failed because when the program hit the bad sectors on the failing disk it hung/froze after a while when I clicked "Ignore all".