Incremental Backup of Windows 7, C: drive, programs and drivers - Acronis 2017 - Advice please and thanks

1. Any advice? I think I would also like to start my Acronis incremental update from this point - is there a good guide on how to do this for Windows 7? 

Just to clarify, I only want to backup the OS/OS Drive/C: Drive, User settings, all installed Programs and drivers. I don't want to to do entire PC backup as that is over 4tb data I don't want attached to an OS back up.

 

Hello Peteza.  It really doesn't matter which OS you're using as long as it's supported.  Basically, you just need to determine how often you need/want to backup (daily, weekly, more frequently, or less), how long you want your incremental chain to be (one week, 2 weeks, a month) and how much space you can estimate it will take to hold that backup chain and the number of chains you want to retain.

As an example, I backup up my OS daily with an incremental scheme.  The full takes place on Monday and then there is a daily incremental Tues-Sunday.  

I keep 3 version chains... This means I always have 3 weeks to go back to... Once the 4th full backup completes, the oldest version chain is automatically cleaned up with the clean up settings. 

And yes, you can just restore the OS, apps and user profile, assuming this is a separate disk and your other large data is located elsewhere?  

Could you clarify if your large data is on the same disk with it's own parition, or on a different disk.  It's still possible, but depends on how you select the source for best options to recover successfully.  

2. If I were to perform an Acronis incremental restore in the future, would I be able to do this after doing a clean reformat install of Windows 7? Do I do this Acronis restore in the bootup sequence, or from within booted Windows itself? 

 

You don't even need to install Windows.  You can use your rescue media (which you should build and test to make sure you can boot it and that it sees your source drive, destination drive, and drive where the backups reside.  As long as it sees all those, you can restore with this rescue media.  Don't ever restore the OS from within Windows, you're asking for trouble if you do.  Always restore your OS drive with rescue media.

3. Would I benefit from any new features within the context of my situation, if I were to update to Acronis 2019?

Probably, but not necessarily.  The new versions keep getting updates and better support.  To me, it is more stable than 2016/2017 and the earlier versions of 2018.  The rescue media builder in 2019 is much better than 2017.  I personally don't use the default Linux rescue media anymore and prefer to build WinPE or WinRE rescue media instead - especially with the custom MVP winpe creator tool.  Mostly for the driver compatibility with the latest PCIE NVME driveds, but the custom tool also adds a lot of nice user-friendly tools like a file explorer and web browser and start menu.  You can actually use this tool to build WinPE rescue media with 2017, but you'll want to download and install the Windows ADK to your system first.

Peteza, welcome to these public User Forums.

1. Any advice? I think I would also like to start my Acronis incremental update from this point - is there a good guide on how to do this for Windows 7? 

Just to clarify, I only want to backup the OS/OS Drive/C: Drive, User settings, all installed Programs and drivers. I don't want to to do entire PC backup as that is over 4tb data I don't want attached to an OS back up.

1.  All Incremental backups must have an initial Full backup image created first - an incremental backup just captures the changes to the selected source data since the previous backup was created. After the first incremental backup, further incremental backups capture again just the changes since the previous backup, which means that an incremental backup version chain is only good if all the files are present (initial Full backup plus all subsequent Incremental backup files).

When you create a Backup task, you don't have to accept the default choice of 'Entire PC' but can click on the Source panel and see further options, where you can select Disks & Partitions then select just your C: OS drive and its partitions.

2. If I were to perform an Acronis incremental restore in the future, would I be able to do this after doing a clean reformat install of Windows 7? Do I do this Acronis restore in the bootup sequence, or from within booted Windows itself? 

2. As above, in order to restore from an Incremental backup, all the files for that version chain need to be present otherwise the chain would be broken!  The process of doing such a recovery is best performed by booting from the Acronis Rescue Media which you can create from within the application in Windows.

You mention having RAID 0 drives in your computer - does this include the C: OS drive, as if it does there are further recovery implications.  Is the RAID implemented at a hardware level such that it shows as a single disk drive when booting from a CD or USB stick?  If not, then you will need to make a customised version of the Acronis Rescue Media with device drivers for RAID, as otherwise Acronis will not see the RAID drives correctly and will not be able to recover the backup to them.

3. Would I benefit from any new features within the context of my situation, if I were to update to Acronis 2019?

3.  Yes, given the complexity and importance of your computer system, then there is extra protection offered by ATI 2019 in the form of Acronis Active Protection to prevent Ransomware / Malware infections which can encrypt your important data, including your Acronis backup files!

Thanks for the detailed replies. I think I can answer both of you guys in one go.

My hard-drive setup is as so:

-500gb Samsung SSD (OS/C: drive) [non-raid]

-500gb Samsung SSD (data drive/audio samples) [non-raid]

-2tb data drive [RAID 0]
-2tb data drive [RAID 0]
=4tb RAID 0 drive 1 [for read data]

-1tb data drive [RAID 0]
-1tb data drive [RAID 0]
=2tb RAID 0 drive 2 [for write data]

The RAID drives created from the on-board Motherboard SATA RAID Controller on a ASUS P6T WS Pro mobo. OS drive is SSD non raid.

I'm not going to use an incremental auto scheduler, this is going to be manual incremental backups as I am only wanting to incrementally backup the installation process of my system up till a point where I have everything I need installed software and driver wise, computers performance seems right and everything seems rock solid stable. After that, my system pretty well becomes a statue and nothing changes.

After initial updates and installs and that's all said and done, I take the computer offline so as to not worry about auto-downloads I don't want or malware/viruses. All future updates to software for the most part are air gap transferred via USB stick (no better security than a gap of air)

After this initial system install/build it becomes more about backing up projects and content, all of which are backed up on a project per folder basis, or the entire project drive which will be a combination of incremental scheduled backups and manual backups. But, no need to focus on this atm. 

I was going to create these initial  backups to the 4tb raid drive as it will back up quicker with RAID 0 and that's where my most open space is at the moment, but then I am going to move the backups to a dedicated external hard-drive that will fit the data to a tee.

I've just realized I've got something to contend with performance wise within the installation of Acronis itself on my system. It seems to be slowing my Windows boot up pre-login screen. Boot up time pre-Acronis is around 20 seconds, whereas post-Acronis, Windows boot-up is 1min25sec.

At first I attributed this to me making a dumbo move defragging my SSD drive after all the windows updates and post-update clean up which apparently you aren't suppose to do with SSDs, but I did a search about Acronis causing this just to be sure, and surely enough there's an article on this problem:
https://kb.acronis.com/content/59811

I actually re-re-formatted my PC this morning after realizing the slow boot up and being unsure of what caused it, I haven't reinstalled Acronis yet.. The boot time is back to around 20 seconds, so the final test would be reinstalling Acronis again and seeing if it goes back to 1:25 boot time...

Some other things to note maybe:
-I'm planning on going into Windows System Protection and deleting all restore points and disabling automatic restore point creation.

On the startup performance issue, some older versions of ATI would disable Windows Fast Start because this interfered with some types of backup activity, so you may be seeing the difference between using Windows Fast Start and when it is disabled / turned off.

FYI as well... If you disable hibernation, fastboot stops too so wanted to mention it as you may have done so. I hate it and always disable hibernation on my desktop PC.

Just curious but what type of drive do you have for the OS? With Acronis and Windows defender and Malwarebytes, and hibernation disables it still only takes 7-10 seconds from cold boot bios screen icon to see my desktop (including entering my password) on a PCIe NVMe drive. It was relatively similar even with a standard SSD as well. Maybe a couple seconds difference, but hardly noticeable. 20 seconds seems reasonable, but a minute difference is pretty drastic.

Both SSDs are Samsung 850 evo.

Hibernation is off for the 20 second boot.

I'm on WIndows 7, I don't think there is a Fast Start. That was from Windows 8 and on.

My Mobo is fairly old, everything in there is fairly old except for Harddrives which are new, and new Ram (32gb), That could be the difference between your 6 seconds and my 20.

Ah, ok, yeah no fast oot for Win7.

I'm sure the hardware difference makes up for some of that delay too. The Evo 850s are great and quite speedy.

If the startup speed issue comes back, try creating a new admin profile as a test to see if it happens on both. If the delay is there before the login, probably won't help though. 

It very well could be Acronis protection slowing things down, or it in conjunction with other startup services.  Haven't noticed any slowdown in 2019 True Image on Win10 1803 or 1809 though.

Doing more detailed tests, just installing Acronis again after a thorough process up till now.

It seems Acronis was not the culprit of the slow bootup. 

Still not sure.

After doing Windows Backup to RAID 0 Write Drive, Windows boot increased by 10 seconds. to 30 seconds total.

Still not the nightmare 1:25 boot time at least. Maybe it was the defrag I did. A couple other things I did around the time was plugin in some external HDs which for whatever reason, messed with my HD bootup sequence in my bios and I wasn't able to exactly recall in my mind what the original boot sequence was in the BIOS.

Hopefully going to do a brand new pc build sometime this year with all modern parts!

I hate when the boot order changes like that! I had that result in the OS changing the volume letters too, which made startup a dog until I fixed it. Primarily because I have some junction points that rely in specific drive letters and a couple of startup programs that cache to specific drive letters and they couldn't find them.

Odd about the startup time increasing after running a simple windows backup though! Maybe AV is scanning the system cold me partition where the VSS snapshots and system protection caching takes place? That area would grow after a backup and as system protection shadow copies are bring created. No idea though.

Yeah I have no idea why the mobo would allow some external USB drives to budge into my onboard SATA drive order, super silly. 

I'm reading I should turn hard drive indexing off, could that be increasing boot time perhaps?

Also, I'm wondering if it's okay to move backups to a different harddrive, and in the case of Acronis incremental backup, can I continue an incremental backup if I have moved the folder to a new harddrive? 

Not sure about the indexing. I've never turned it off and speeds are fine on my end, but I'm also on 2019 for sometime now too.

It is possible to move backups manually, but can cause issues in the GUI since it had a database to keep track of everything.

You'd probably be better off in the long run just creating a new backup to the other drive and hold on to the old backups for awhile if you need the history, or clean it out once the new backup is done.

But if you do want to move it, you can. Then validate the backup. You'll have to tell it each time where the corresponding file is located and then it should be good to go. Make sure to update the backup script with the new destination before it runs again. It should keep the Inc going then, but it may mess up the version chain count, which could actually make more incrementals than you originally set (for instance if you say to keep 10 incrementals and have 5 now, you may end up with 15 if the count starts over). That's why it may be better to just start with a new one on the new drive.