What backup should I choose?
Over the past few days I have been experimenting with the various backups it is possible to make with Acronis. Now , under the "My backups" heading on my external drive I have the following different backups it seems: "My system", "Partition_backup_RECOVERY_OCS", "My Backup" and "emails".
All I'd like to be able to do is a regular backup of absolutely everything that is on my laptop, so that when I restore things they will be exactly as they were when I did the backup. (I'm not concerned about loosing any files that have arrived on the pc since the last backup was made.) So can you please tell me which of the aforementioned backups I should be doing regularly?
Please don't tell me to read the help pages. I've done so, and found them rather confusing - I'm getting on a bit now, so I hope you will forgive me. Thanks for any info, and if anyone reading this would care also to give brief clear descriptions of the various backups I've listed I'm sure they would be appreciated my many newbies like myself.
The most important backup you need is a backup of your disk, all partitions included.
- choose Disk And Partition Backup,
- in the upper right of the windows that pops up, click "swith to disk mode"
- select the disk that contains the "system" partition. Disk OCZ-VERT... in my attachment. Yours will be different probably.
- in the destination, verify that you see you backup disk (V: in my picture). If you don't like your backup disk, click on the destination and choose the one your prefer,
- click on backup now. Later, you can decide to run this backup on a schedule.
If you have a full disk, it might take a while.
Once the backup is complete, validate it (operations > Validate). It is good to this from time to time. Later you can decide to automate this.
Once validation is complete, create a bootable rescule disk (unless you received Acronis on a CD, then this CD can be used to boot your computer).
YOu will have to use this CD if your computer disk dies completely and you have to replace it.
Put the CD in the comptuer, and reboot your computer on the CD (make sure your BIOS settings allow for booting on a CD). If the computer restarts normally, it didn't boot on the CD. Shut down, restart and hit immediately the F2 key until you see the BIOS. Look for the boot options and enable booting on the CD. Try again to boot with the CD in.
After the computer has booted on the CD, you will see a different version of ATI running. Simulate a restore. This will make sure you can find your backup, and see how ATI works from the CD. Just don't proceed with the restore at the last step.
WATCH OUT: the partitions letters on the CD version (C:\ D:\) are not the same as in Windows. For example C:\System in windows might become D:\System on the CD. Look at the Labels, not the letter. Everything will work normally again in Windows.
Thanks for a most detailed reply. I will try this. One more question - is it possible to create a schedule which automatically deletes the last backup after creating the new one? My backups often fail because of lack of space on the drive. Thank you.
All the best, Caroline Hayes
Caroline,
ATI will first do the new backup and then delete the old one. So you need enough space for 2 full backups if you want ATI to do this automatically.
Alternatively, you can:
- if you do full backup only, delete the backup manually from within ATI or from Windows explorer,
- if you do full + incremental/differential, delete older versions of the backup from within ATI *only*, and then continue the backup,
- start a new task with a new name. For the scheme, choose "custom", then incremental:, always do incremental, turn on auto-consolidation, and keep only one backup. See picture attached. There is some risk with auto-consolidation as it requires a lot of space to execute on top of the existing backup. So the autoconsolidation might fail.
You know, I would personally not hesitate to buy a bigger USB hard drive (to have at least 2 times the total capacity of the drives you want to backup.
