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Sector backup

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I've been asked to try and recover some data from a hard disk. I have the laptop but I'd prefer to run EasyRecovery Pro off an image just in case. I've just taken a sector-level image of the hard disk and I'm sure it said it will be as big as a the original hard disk, e.g. 120GB. It's not - the TLB image is ~30GB which is about the amount of used space on there.

Is this a complete sector level image? If I restore this to a VMware hard disk, will it be a bit-level copy? I need the later to carry out a sector level restore.

Thanks, Rob.

PS. This forum is painfully slow.

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Hello Rob,

I will do everything possible in order to resolve the issue you experience but first can you please clarify the exact title of the program?

The sector-by-sector method allows you to create an image of all sectors of the selected partition. This image will contain not only sectors with data but also sectors that are empty. As a result, this image will be equal in size to the disk being imaged, as there will be no data compression. This method is useful if a partition being backed up is not supported by the Acronis product or is corrupted. In this case, all sectors of this partition are included in this image and will be restored.

Using corporate versions of Acronis products you can create a sector-by-sector image from command-line by adding the /raw parameter. (For Linux systems the parameter is --raw).

For example,

trueimagecmd /create /filename:"C:\Test\1.tib" /partition:2-1 /raw

This will create a sector-by-sector backup archive of partition 1 on disk 2 and place it in folder Test on drive C:. The name of archive will be 1.tib.

See respective documentation for additional information.

In Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 you can also create the raw image by ticking off the Back up sector-by-sector checkbox when specifying disks or volumes to back up.

Let us know if you need further assistance.