Disk Mode Backup of System Drive Question in Acronis 2014
I have repeatedly used Acronis to image discs by booting with an Acronis CD, and cloning the discs. I just purchased Acronis 2014, hoping on three of my Windows 8 and Windows 7 PCs to run regular backup jobs INSIDE Windows, to backup the system volume and the second data and program discs in each machine. I successfully used it to clone the three discs in my primary data and image storage server, up-sizing all three from older 500 GB drives to new WD Black 1 TB drives. Cloned, popped in, booted up, and working fine.
Right now I want to back up my Win 8.1 development PC.
I go into the option Switch to Disc Mode, and see the two drive on my 8.1 PC. I can point the backup to a file name on a partition I have set up under a new drive letter on a large disc I have partitioned for backups.
Under backup options in the lower right, I can select 'back up sector by sector.'
I cannot check 'Make this media bootable.' I find in the KB that this option is only possible if backing up to a CD/DVD or thumb drive. I assume this is because you really do not want more than one disc marked active and bootable in the machine.
The big question for me is, will backing up my system drive (C:) using the options above create an image I can restore to a new disk in case of failure, a restore which will give me a BOOTABLE SYSTEM DISC?
I am running the backup as a single image option backup, so it deletes the old backup and creates an entire new image each time.
The whole point of my backing up like this is to avoid having to reinstall especially my preimary 8.1 development PC. A clean reinstall of the OS and all the development software and and setting up the configurations can take a couple of days, time I really do not have or want to spend.
I know I can always drop a couple of drives in and boot to an Acronis bootable CD and image the drives, but that is not as easy as setting up a couple jobs to run from inside Windows to do the job every night.
Hope I have stated the issue clearly. If not, let me know. Would appreciate insight / reassurance on how Acronis backup as described above works when you want to restore a system disk.
Ronald,
A review of my signature link 2A below can help. It illustrates the diskmode backup and it is this mode which give you best backup for a restore to a new disk or the old disk. Se t up your backup scheme as per one of my examples so you will have a system of revolving backups with the oldest chain being deleted automatically by the program.
Your 'How to' was detailed and excellent.
Yesterday I had set up two jobs, one to backup the sysvol, one to backup the data drive. I selected the 'Single Version' option, which states it will delete and overwrite the previous backup. Both reported success, although the copy runs very, very slow. We are talking hours for each.
Today the overnight scheduled jobs reported failure. It is possible this was because the computer was not waked up, although I thought I selected the wake up computer option in advanced settings in Acronis on both jobs.
However, more worrisome, the jobs were displaying a yellow warning "There may not be enough disk space".
There should be, if the job option is to delete and write a new complete image. I selected the sector by sector option for both jobs. For the sysvol, source is 233 GB or so, target partition/drive is 512 GB. For the data, source is 1.81 TB, target partition/drive is 2.24 TB. Surely that is enough room for Acronis to store any meta information in addition to the backup file??
At any rate, for the data drive, I just switched to a 'custom' job per your suggestion. I selected a non-incremental, complete backup, and told it to not retain any backup older than 1 day. That is the lowest option available.
FWIW, it is running now, and predicting the same 4.5 or so hours to run.
I am assuming when it did its calculations when job is triggered it would hopefully be smart enough to see there sure was not room for a second copy, so it would delete the first.
I am going to let the other job for the sysvol run tonight unchanged from the original 'Single Version' option I selected.
I will report back what tomorrow on both jobs.
I plan to take a couple of scratch drives and attempt a restore after I get the backups running.
An untested backup is NOT a backup, something I always tried to teach those I taught and managed.
Well, that did not work.
The attempt to run the job twice, expecting it to overwrite, cruised along for an hour or more, than failed:
"The disk is full. You must free additional disk space to continue. You can either empty the recycle bin or delete old data files. To specify another location, click browse."
Why there should be a reference to the recycle bin makes no sense, unless Acronis is foolishly trying to stuff a deleted backup into the the recycle bin on the system drive, which on this machine is 233 GB large (fast SSD).
The backup file that was completed this morning is still sitting there on the 2 TB target drive.
This is not good.
Be advised that the application requires a minimum of twice the amount of free space for each backup task than the total size of the backup. This is because the application will create a new backup prior to deleting the first backup. This is by design and cannot be changed. So if your backup is 500GB in size you will need at the bare minimum 1TB of disk space to create a backup followed by another backup that replaces the first backup.
"the application requires a minimum of twice the amount of free space for each backup..."
Well, that is just awesome. I wish I had known that before buying the drives I bought to use as backup drives.
I had just about reached conclusion it had to be something like this, because first backups always worked on a clean disk, then second attempt failed, always. And I could observe and see the program creating a second backup. I had even turned off save to recycle in on the target backup drives, on Win 7 and win 8.1 machines, hoping that would solve the problem, i.e. hoping it was at the Windows level trying to delete the prior backup. Nope: The overnight backups on both machines failed.
I assumed when I selected 'single version' which would require 'minimum disk space' it actually MEANT that, but well, there you have it.
I wish I had known this before investing in the 2 and 3 TB drives. It looks like I am going to need a 4 TB drive.
Here is a note to developers. It would be nice if by design you had an option to tell the program to delete the prior single image backup FIRST, at user request, so the backup would actually work from e.g. a 2 TB to a 2 TB drive.
At this point, I may just manually run disk images after booting to the Acronis CD I created, since I know that works, I have used it repeatedly.
But I really need a solution for imaging automatically overnight when I am in the middle of development work.
You could always manually delete the first backup if you don't wish to have the safety of having a verified backup before deleting the earlier backup. That would allow you to keep the drives you bought.
As a practical matter though, you should want to be keeping at least two versions of a full backup in case one is defective for some reason.
I would also concur with Kary. It is never wise to delete a good working backup until you have a proven replacment. As Kary as pointed out, one solution is to clear the storage folder before you begin a new chain but if you do, be sure and use the TI program to perform the delete so you will keep the meta history file current.
GH5. How to delete backup files using Acronis Backup 'Explorer'
If you have two storage disks, consider creating two tasks and use both disks on an alternating basis so you always have a good backup available. Each backup task must be tied to a specific disk otherwise the task will fail when attempting a backup to a different disk.
In your original post, you wrote:
"Under backup options in the lower right, I can select 'back up sector by sector."
Usings the sector by sector option, this backs up the non-used space so your backups become as large as the partition. Normally with TI, this option is not used and not necessary so the backup size is about 65-70 % of used space of whatever is included within the backup.
I wonder if the OP wasn't using sector by sector that he might have room for 3 or 4 backups on the drive? The problem might go away.
Kary,
Maybe. Omitting that option would make the backups smaller, but we have no clue as to what he is including within the backup and what his used space is.
If he followed my signature link 2-A below and performed the same steps as in the first four images, the 4th image would provide an estimated backup size.
Followup on the helpful comments above:
I was doing a sector by sector backup, as the documentation seemed to imply that was necessary in order to get a true disk image that could restore to a bootable image.
The documentation also seemed to clearly imply that only disk sectors filled with data would be backed up if you checked only the first option, sector by sector, and did NOT check the option to backup unallocated space. Since in the case of the two workstations, the vast majority of space was unallocated, I would have assumed there would have been room on the target disk for at least 4 or 5 images. However, that is not what was happening, there was room for only one image.
Also, these backups run from within Windows were very, very slow. Backing up e.g. a system volume which had only 115 GB used space on a 233 GB drive, to a 500 GB drive, would fail on the first attempt to do a second backup. And the first successful backup took 4.5 hours. The data drive, 55 GB used, 1.76 TB free, took nearly six hours. So I suspect it was clearly backing up unallocated sectors, even thought that was NOT checked.
Last night, having run through all the options, I cleared the target disks, and on the Win 8.1 PC with the 233 GB Sysvol and a 1 TB data / program drive (only 55 GB used, 1.76 TB free), I booted to the Aconis bootable disk, and created disk images of both drives to the two target drives. Imaging the drives this way took between 8 and 12 minutes each.
Since I have been using Acronis to image drives for several years, and fully trust it, I have decided for now to just do this frequently on my two development PCs. E.g. I used it recently to upsize all three drives on my data server, a Win 2008 R2 machine, moving each from 500 GB to 1 TB size WD Black drives.
FWIW, all my source code and data (except for test data in local SQL server) live on my servers, anyway, and they are backed up nightly in two ways, robocopy jobs to an independent drive, and MS Windows 2008 R2 Windows backup bare metal system recovery full backup to a second independent drive.
My primary concern with the two development workstations is having an image that I can revert to in case of disaster, so I do not have to reinstall and reconfigure all the many levels of development software, which include SQL Server, Visual Studio, Crystal Reports, Web services, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Two days usually to reinstall and sort it all out. Much easier to open the box, switch the SATA cables, reboot, and go back to work.
Anyway, thanks for all the helpful observations.
I would like however to understand why, if I was NOT checking backup unallocated sectors, the second effort backup bombed without enough space. Look at the stats on the used space again on the 2 TB drive. Only 55 GB in use at the moment? Something seems not right there.
I was doing a sector by sector backup, as the documentation seemed to imply that was necessary in order to get a true disk image that could restore to a bootable image.
Incorrect.
Do not select the sector-by-sector option. It is unnecessary. All it does it increase the time used for the backup and significantly increase the backup size, with no benefit (except in specific cases).
"Sector-by-sector" includes sectors that are not in use, that have no data on them. You'd backup empty space for no benefit.
Would sector by sector prevent you from restoring to a smaller drive?
If I do NOT select sector by sector, does it still to the equivalent of an image backup, that would include MBR and required system partitions on the boot drives on the Win 7 and Win 8.1 sysvols? Does it include all the registry information? Or is it just a file backup, that does not get required system information for a bare metal restore, which the disk clone created when booting to an Acronis bootable CD does?
If I do NOT select sector by sector, does it still to the equivalent of an image backup, that would include MBR and required system partitions on the boot drives on the Win 7 and Win 8.1 sysvols? Does it include all the registry information? Or is it just a file backup, that does not get required system information for a bare metal restore, which the disk clone created when booting to an Acronis bootable CD does?
Yes. Full Disk Backup is what is recommended for most cases.
If I do NOT select sector by sector, does it still to the equivalent of an image backup, that would include MBR and required system partitions on the boot drives on the Win 7 and Win 8.1 sysvols? Does it include all the registry information?
Yes, if you create a full disk mode backup, which is what we recommend.
I suggest that you do some reading to learn how ATI works and how best to use it. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.
In particular, 29618: Grover's new backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618
There's also a full on-line user manual, and a downloadable user manual.
Grover's How to Create a "Disk Image" or "Disk Mode" Image: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/38691