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How can I relocate the folders containing the ATI definitions of all my backups to another partition than C?

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It is a well established recommendation, especially among users familiar with backup scenarios, that "user-data" and "user definitions" should not be stored on the C partition. Sticking to this recommendation allows to restore the C partition to an older state, without affecting and without losing "user data" and "user definitions".

Some examples of "user definitions" are the dictionaries used by MS Word, the Favorites used by IE, the Photo-Catalogs/databases used by Photoshop Elements and Lightrrom,.... . The user can relocate them to the location of his choice; for example to another partition than the C Partition.

Another example of "user definitions/data" are the ATI descriptions of my Backups (among other the description of the interrelationships between Incremental and Full Backups that I have run so far). But, I did not find out how to store the Acronis True Image Home 2010 definitions of my backups and of my Backup tasks to another place than "C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome" which contains (on my Windows 7 Ultimate (64 bit) PC) the following ATI subfolders: Logs, Scripts, Archive, Database,…. Can you please help me?

This is important for me. Because, if I ever restore my C Partition to a 3 old-month-state (this arrived to me in the past, because I participate in Beta Programs of Photo-Organization Software), I will then lose all the information that ATI has stored there within the previous 3 months.

A possible solution, would be (a) to backup the ATI subfolders mentioned above, then (b) to restore my C Partition to the 3 month-old state and then (c) to restore the ATI subfolders that I have just backed up in item (a). But how can I get the guarantee, that this will not result in problems (for example, because some details in the ATI subfolders will not match some other details in the Registry?).

And how can I know reliably and exactly
- which are ATI folders and files that i need to backup and restore (in (a) and (c) above and )?
- which are the ATI folders that i shall not touch?

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To find a solution to the problematic described in my previous Post, I contacted the german-speaking Acronis Support.

 I am grateful to Bazhen Klimchuk from Acronis (I believe: from Acronis Germany) for the excellent and timely support that I got from him.

In our email exchanges, I learned from Bazhen, that I do not need to worry too much:

  • about restoring an old version of the C Partition
  • and about the effects on ATI when restoring with this old version of the C Partition the old version of the ATI Metadata located in the C partition.

I was worried that when restoring a 3-month old version of the C Partition, it would not be reasonably/easily feasible to use anymore the incremental Backup Files created in this 3 month period (I was fearing that the ATI-metadata describing the relationship between the recent incremental backup files and the recent Full-Backup files would go lost with the restore of the 3 month-old C Partition).

Bazhen insisted that this was not the case and a test demonstrated that he was right. In this test, I copied a set of backup files consisting of a Full Backup File and its associated Incremental Backup files to another Folder, and renamed consistently these file copies. Then I "imported" one of these files into the ATI Metadata (with a "Search" of the "Recovery" Window of ATI Home).

The test showed, that it is sufficient to "import" just one of these files….to make ATI aware of the whole file set consisting in  the Full-Backup File and its associated Incremental Backup Files ….and to make ATI aware of the relationship of all these files. Great!

Based on the explanations of Bahzen and on the results of this simple test, I am not anymore much concerned about a scenario where I will need to restore an old copy of the C partition and of the ATI Metadata. ATI can cope with such a scenario, if I perform the "import" sketched above.

Of course, in such a scenario, I will still lose my newest ATI Task definitions and I will need to define them again after the Restore of the C Partition. But this is not a tragedy, since my task definitions do not change a lot and I will therefore not need to re-define a lot of task definitions.