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Restoring from backup is tougher than expected

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Hi guys, I bought 10 licenses of Acronis for my machines. I've been having issues since day 1 with them. Basically, I have a mix of computers from macs to pcs. The main issue is the PCs. Some are bought from Dell and others are DIY. The machines I am having issues with is the one made by a company that is now defuncted. 

Basically, the idea was to use Acronis to "image" my drive so that every month, I could easily just revert back to a brand new machine without installing all my applications again. I suppose I am not very good with computers, especially windows as I have no had any luck thus far.

I initally thought it would be as simple as just double clicking on the image but Acronis told me to install that boot disk thing. Thing is, the USB doesn't work. I've gone to the bios to change it to boot from USB key, USB Floppy, USB anything. No luck. I don't know the motherboard brand as it is probably been flashed into its own as the computer sees it as the brand that is now defuncted.

Please help. I just wanna restore. I've been too busy since I got it and now my phone support is out and I have 10 useless licenses if I don't get this going. Are there other ways?

 

I am using Windows 10 Pro with Acronis True Image 2015 Build:6613

I tried the Unviversal Restore Media Builder, created linux as well as windows variants and also changed my boot up from Legacy to UEFI which didn't help. ended up in some shell command area upon boot.

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Wen Hao Tan, welcome to these user forums.

In order to recover your Windows OS from a backup image then you will need to create and use the Acronis bootable Rescue Media which can be on CD/DVD or USB stick, as this type of operation has to be performed completely outside of the Windows OS.

You also need to understand how your Windows 10 OS boots on your computer systems, i.e. does it use UEFI or is it a Legacy boot?
See webpage: Check if your PC uses UEFI or BIOS for help in finding out this information.
The key point here is that both your Windows OS and the Acronis Rescue Media must both boot in the same way, i.e. both UEFI or both Legacy, if you want the restore / recovery to be successful.

On systems such as your Dell computers, you can normally access a Boot Override menu by pressing the F12 key after powering on the computer, this should then show you a list of available boot devices that you can choose from, so if you have USB media enabled as boot devices, this should be shown in the boot override menu.  You may see the same device shown twice if your system allows both UEFI and Legacy / CSM, so again it is important that you select the correct device.

Finally, if you are intending to do a full disk recovery, then you must include all hidden / system partitions in your backup image file.

See post: 128057: [Tutorial] How to recover an entire disk backup for a guided document showing how a full disk recovery is done using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media.  This was written for ATIH 2017 but the principle remains the same for your 2015 product.

Note: the Acronis Universal Restore media is only used after first doing a successful recovery / restore to different hardware, where this tool is used to prepare the restored OS to work with the changed hardware by changing device drivers to use more generic versions.

Hey Steve,

Thanks for the prompt reply. Sorry, I think my mac years are catching up to me. It is really not working.

 

So I went to "Backup" and clicked on recover disk, selected the backup and also clicked on recover partitions. The second I hit recover, It pops up a warning saaying a computer restart is required & if I choose not to, the operation will be cancelled. I click on restart. And I end up right back where I last was. I am so confused.

Also, under tools 

- Rescue Media Builder 

That basically tells me to create bootable rescue media

if I click on

- Acronis Unversal Restore

That also tells me to create a bootable media as well

One more thing to point out. I've got a partition of the main hard drive where the back up resides. All I truly wanted was a software to do a quick double click and restore based on what i backed up. Whats the easiest way to do this for acronis as this isn't working out for me.

Wen Hao Tan wrote:
So I went to "Backup" and clicked on recover disk, selected the backup and also clicked on recover partitions. The second I hit recover, It pops up a warning saaying a computer restart is required & if I choose not to, the operation will be cancelled. I click on restart. And I end up right back where I last was. I am so confused.

When you take the option to do this type of recovery from within Windows, then Acronis will always need to restart in order to create a temporary Linux OS environment from which to do the recovery, and will also need to modify your Windows boot configuration to use this Linux OS.  This in itself can be a problem, especially if your system has UEFI & Secure Boot enabled, which may prevent Linux from booting.

I would always recommend creating the Acronis bootable Rescue Media to do this type of recovery - this will always be needed if you suffer a hard disk failure and need to do a bare-metal recovery (with no Windows available).

If you backup image resides on a separate partition on the same physical drive that you are restoring to, then it is essential that you do not do a full disk recovery as this will wipe that other partition, so you need to select only the partition to be restored and point this at the correct target partition.

There is no simple double click method of restoring an OS backup with this product.