Best practice when restoring OS to an earlier point in time
I have been running both Disk and File Backups for some weeks now, and have encountered a problem with my system sounds that I would like to try to eliminate by restoring the OS to an earlier point in time. I obviously want to retain my current applications without having to reinstall all of them, and I also want to get back to a position where all my documents are up to date as well as my Outlook mail file.
Would the correct procedure be as follows:
1. do a Disk partition restore to the chosen point in time
2. recover all documents from latest File backup set?
I am trying to figure out what I would get if the point in time to which I restore the Disk is earlier than the date at which the current File backup set's full backup was run.
Or is there an easier approach than this?
Hardware: Dell Vostro V13 notebook
OS: Windows 7 Professional SP1 Build 7601
TrueImage 2013 backing up to a NAS device
Many thanks - hopefully the disk restore is proceeding (slowly) at home while I type this from the office!
Hmmm... Restore has now been running for over 25 hours, reading from an Iomega Storcenter ix2-200 NAS device over a network that should support 100Mbps (nominal - it's a home broadband router, so I have no ilusions). The backup set is 199GB, so if the network ran at maximum capacity, that seems to me to imply 4.5 hours to copy the data back. Even at a quarter of nominal speed it should only have taken 20 hours. Any ideas anyone?
If I interrupt a restore, what are the possible outcomes? Can it be resumed or do I start again from scratch? Can I even start again from scratch, as TrueImage seems to be running in some kind of cut-down shell?
If the restore can be paused, is there any way I can re-attach the Storcenter using a USB cable and then carry on? Never done this so I have no idea whether the correct drivers would be in place.
Iain,
If you interrupt a disk restore, you will be left with an unbootable destination disk that will quite posisbly show up as unallocated. You would need to start the restore again.
Interrupting a Files and Folders recovery may or may not cause corruption, my gut feeling, as I haven't tried this, would be that in most cases it would be OK to do this, but not if restoring something that uses databases such as Live Mail, Outlook, etc.
Have you checked that your image is sound before you start the recovery? You wouldn't want such a long restore time to occur and only to find it fails.
I think if your recovery is taking such a long time (it seems excessive to me) it might be that the Linux environment doesn't have an efficient driver for the NAS. Check also that you haven't got validation enabled as that will take almost twice as long as the recovery takes.
I misread your post slightly, no, you can't pause a restore ro making an image either manually, which would be a nice feature to have.
If you go the USB route, make sure you plug it into a rear USB port on the PC if possible and that it is running as USB2.0.
OK so the Disk Restore finshed after over 40 hours, and everything worked fine albeit time-shifted back to 10 February! I didn't really have the space to make another copy of the user files, so am relying on restoring those from File Backups. Unfortunately those, too, are proceeding at a snail's pace.
Is there any way, given that I have multiple Incremental backups to go through, of queuing these to run serially? I have to go away for the weekend and could leave it running.
Incidentally it is not just the restore operations that take ages. Everything, from the moment I click "Recover", is incredibly slow to respond, so I have to go away and make a coffee before the tree structure of each date's backups gets displayed. Is this just another instance of poor response from the NAS device driver software, or is there something going wrong within TrueImage?
Are you able or willing to start the imaging from within Windows, it will be much quicker than using the recovery environment.
Given that the restore of the disk image has completed, I'm not sure I understand the question. The stage I'm at now is to try to bring my user documents back up to date, for which I am attempting to use the File Level backups.
However assuming for the moment that restoring a disk image is something I might need to do differently, let me explain what I did this time. I selected the "Disk Backup" option and clicked "Recover". I was presented with two options (not mutually exclusive) and I selected to restore the C: partition but not the Recovery partition. As far as I can recall, TrueImage then took over and, at some point, rebooted itself into the recovery environment. I am not aware of having been presented with the option to run the entire restore from within Windows. How could this work? Wouldn't it get into a conflict with itself over the use of disk resource?
Recover", is incredibly slow to respond, so I have to go away and make a coffee before the tree structure of each date's backups gets displayed. Is this just another instance of poor response from the NAS device driver software, or is there something going wrong within TrueImage? "
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have a new version of ATI 2013 and find that what Ian said above to 100% true when exploring the tree structure during backup or recover.
I am not using any NAS devices, just SATA and USB 2.0 drive.
Really, this is too slow and I expect a much higher level of performance by Acronis with the type of hardware we have these days.