Trying to back up a bootable image to a network drive
Hello, Acronis.
I'm trying to create a complete bootable image of a hard disk and save it to a networked 3TB hard drive. I've been fiddling with your True Image Home 2011 Trial Edition and found that whenever I select my network drive as the destination, the "Make this media bootable" checkbox is greyed out and unselectable.
My objective is to have a complete, bootable copy of my hard drive saved safely on a network, so that if my primary disk has a catastrophic failure, I can install the bootable image onto a fresh new hard drive and be back up and running in minutes.
Is this merely a limitation of the Trial version? Is there another version of your software (Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Workstation, maybe?) that will do this? It seems like such a basic request that there must be some simple solution.
Thanks.
~Scott
After posting this, I opened a chat window with a tech support representative, Puneet Vijayvergi. After talking over the issue, he informed me that the only way to make a network destination into a bootable disk would be to format it in FAT32. That seems rather odd to me, since 99% of hard drives these days come preformatted as NTFS, and furthermore, FAT32's size limitation of 32GB means that it would be unable to back up any decent modern hard drive (heck, it's hard to even FIND hard drives below 32GB anymore!). Creating a backup solution that doesn't work for 90% of their customer base strikes me as bizarre.
Pat, thanks for the quick reply!
Is there a way to do that without having to work with CDs or DVDs? Also, I haven't gone through the full cycle of backup-boot-recover yet, but it strikes me as odd that you advise me to avoid recovering at the end of the recovery wizard. Why would I want to cancel the recovery process?
Sure! The idea is to *test* whether you actually can recover. If you have the chance of having a spare disk you can do a full test recovery, even better. But booting on the CD, verifying that you can access your backup on the network, that you can see the disks you want to restore to, that you get comfortable with the change in drive letters that might be confusing at first, and validating the archive from the restore is already a big confidence boost that you can do a recovery if the actual need presents itself.
I am suprised about the network destination formatted in FAT32. I would guess there is some confusion and that he meant a local disk formatted in FAT32...
Also just to be clear: the destination of your backup doesn't need to be bootable. Your backup is just a TIB file you can store anywhere (as long as you can access it with the recovery CD...). You can use the recovery CD to boot. Of course, there might be some convenience in having the boot thing and the TIB thing on the same drive, but this is not necessary.
FAT32's size limitation of 32GB means that it would be unable to back up any decent modern hard drive
It's Windows that doesn't allow to format new partition larger than 32 Gb as FAT32, it can use it if it's already formatted.
Then, there is no way to make the network destination bootable at all - you have to have it connected locally so that it can be accessed on sector level to write bootable components on it, when on the network you only can write and read only on file level.