Pretend Scenario

Kevin

Scenario:
#1 .

TIH would restore Windows 7 and all the programs installed on that OS, you would lose your new W8 OS. If you just needed data back then that would be no problem. You would probably require the Plus Pack as the new laptop may well use different drivers to your old one, unless exactly the same model and from the same batch. Laptop manufacturers often change hardware and drivers behind the scenes even while a model is in production and between sales territories - so a laptop/PC for Asia Pacific may not have the same hardware/software/drivers as the same model for the US market.

There is a program that will port your Windows 7 installation to Windows 8 (released this Friday according to the sales blurb they sent me), this is made by Laplink, but is sold by an Acronis competitior under another name.

#2

You need a complete disk image for this scenario, True Image is ideal for this.

#3

As you say this is unlikely to be a complete disk image, sounds more like a partition image, probably a utilities or system partition. Make sure you click on the hyperlink and select complete disk, the disk shows up by it's manufacturers name.

A screensnip of your disk selection screen would be helpful.

Kevin wrote:

Hello all -

I am new to this backing up stuff. So I have a question. My reason for backing up has been some close calls with major loss of everything I have on my laptop. So let me paint a scenario:

1) I am traveling around the world, and my laptop gets stolen in an airport. Its gone. And everything on it. However I have my external hard drive at home with a backup. The assumption is that I buy a new laptop. And to make things complicated lets say the old laptop had Windows 7 and the new laptop has Windows 8.

With this hypothetical scenario, what type of backup would I want to have done already with Acronis TrueImage, to ensure that I can get all my stuff onto the new laptop?

You'd want a disk and partition backup (aka an image backup). You can restore the entire win7 image with all the apps and content on your Win 8 computer with the universal restore feature (since the computers are different) and you find yoursefl with a Win7 computer (your Win8 installation is erased) unless you restore to use your computer in a dual boot mode.
You could also restore only your content from your Win7 image to your Win8 computer, but you would have to reinstall the apps.

2) I am at home, and my laptop wont boot. For whatever reason the operating system is fried. I want to get everything back working again, from top to bottom including operating system.

With this hypothetical scenario, what type of backup would i want to have done already to ensure that I have an exact working copy of how things where before the OS got hosed?

You want the same backup. You simply restore on the same disk or another disk. This is the core use case of Acronis True Image (ATI)

3) I am confused about something. I did what i think is called an "IMAGE" of my entire C drive, backed it up, and I swear it took maybe 15 minutes. The entire thing. But when I went back and did a manual backup of selected directories .... only a handful of them ..... it literally took nearly 2 hours to complete. I thought a mirror image of the entire drive is every single file including Operating system and system files and everything? Why would that take a fraction of the time of a much smaller selection of files?

Make sure you have click on Disk and Partition backup from the main UI, and you have all the necessary partitions selected. Ideally you'd switch to disk mode to select the entire disk. If your backup took 15mn, you probably have backed up about 30GB-40GB. Most likely you backed up only the C:\system partition and your content is somewhere else... I don't know

An overview:
Acronis True Image 2013 is a Backup and Recovery package which in its standard form provides the user with the capability of creating a recovery backup. This standard version provides the user with the capability of restoring the user created package onto the ORIGINAL COMPUTER or a new replacement disk which is going back into the ORIGINAL COMPUTER. If the computer is infected with a virus or broken hard drive, this standard package will enable the user to recovery the computer back to the same data as existed at time of backup.

Should the user want or need to restore the backup onto a different computer, a additional supplement (Acronis TrueImage Plus Pack) must be purchased and installed onto the standard TrueImage package. This additional installation includes a 2nd serial number which becomes part of the supplemental installation.

Once the Plus Pack is installed, the program provides the capability to the user of restoring the backup onto different hardware. In order for this to be a successful recovery, the user MUST provide needed drivers for the new computer hardware and this is part of the restoring backup process. A restore will replace the new computer software with the software from the original computer but with new drivers needed.

Any backup software has its own learning curve and requires actual use of the software as part of the learning curve. In order to be successful in transferring the backup onto a different computer, this process needs attention to detail and its success depends upon the user finding and providing all the required new files needed by the new hardware, etc.

When TrueImage 2013 is supplemented with the extra charge Plus Pack, the program has the capability of doing what you want it to do but much will depend upon the skills of the user. You don't have to be computer "geek" but there is an actual use learning curve which must be addressed.

These links could be helpful in your becoming familiar with TrueImage 2013.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/28705

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

Pat can you edit the quote in your post to remove my last name? I erroneously had it as my nickname . Have since changed it.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I will respond soon. More questions ...

Okay I am back.

There seems to be something missing from this equation. A couple people above stated that the complete disk image couldn't have gone faster than my individual file / folder selections backup did. When I did this, the complete disk image took a very short time. The backup I did of selected files and folders took hours.

So I followed your instructions and confirmed: Full Disk Image - three partitions - complete drive. Size stated was 90.32 GB in size .... and guess how long it took? 26 minutes.

Then I selected manually my data folders (images, video files, documents, outlook PST files) .... only 27.57 GB, and this backup is showing over 2 hours.

Can someone explain this? My assumption is that the Disk Image backup goes faster because it zips everything up or something? And the data backup goes file by file?

I have experienced the same time differences when choosing file/folder backups vs. disk/partition backups. This is normal behavior.
When doing a disk/partition backup, Acronis makes a system snapshot of the used sectors on the drive and creates a backup file that contains the used sector data without looking at the files. In file/folder mode, Acronis uses the file system to determine the files needing to backed up. This process is considerably slower than a disk/partition backup.
See: http://kb.acronis.com/content/13474

Well there you go. That explains my original question in the first post then :)

One more:

What do we do if 15 years passes and we want to restore one of these backups and Acronis has gone out of business, and they are Acronis proprietary technology files, so we cant? Are the files created in a standard format that any program will be able to do a proper "Restore" with, or must you have trueimage to do the restore?

Im sure the company wont go out of business anytime soon, but i backed things up over 15 years ago - and all i can say is thank god "ZIP" is still around .....

Okay I found my answer. TrueImage can backup to ZIP! Amazing what reading the user manual will do. However dont hold me to this, since its TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY NINE PAGES LONG. :)