Shrinking Windows 7 partition - adding Ubuntu partition
I'm using True Image 2014 Premium on my Windows 7 desktop to perform a disk backup of the "C" drive that has the "system" partition and the OEM recovery partition on it. I'm using full backups every 7 days with daily differentials in between. I'm about to shrink the "system" partition (using disk management) to make room for an Ubuntu install in the new unallocated space.
Is there any reason to make any changes to my existing TI disk backup settings? I think not since it's a "disk" backup and not a "partition" backup (even if it was a partition backup I'm not sure there'd need to be any changes either other than to add the Ubuntu partition). Is TI going to get "surprised" when it goes to backup the C disk the next day and finds a shrunken "system" partition and a "new" Ubuntu partition?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

- Accedi per poter commentare

shadowsports,
Thanks for the response. My system is UEFI with MBR but I'm planning to switch to RAID soon to get a mirror of C drive going. But that's another story. I've just used TI to clone the C drive to another drive and also verified my TI disk backup by performing a true restore from the backup to the C drive. So I'm pretty confident that if something goes dump in the night during the partition shrinking and Ubuntu install that I'll be able to get back to where I was before starting all this.
I'm hoping to end up with the Windows boot loader as the primary boot loader and not GRUB. I'll have to see how that ends up after the Ubuntu install.
It will be interesting to see how the existing TI "disk" backup performs with the new Ubuntu partition, which I *think* will be formatted ext4. Ext4 is supposed to be supported in 2014 TI for disk or partition backup/restore. I'll post here what happens.
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Well, sorry for the long delay to responding back on progress.
The answer (for my situation) is "yes", TI will "ride through" partition manipulations like those described above, with a minor caveat. After I finished with the Ubuntu install, the next scheduled TI "disk" backup log was "successful", noted the changes in partitions and went ahead and backed up the changes.
The caveat was that when TI got to the EXT4 formatted partition (my assumption), it gave the following new messages (step 10 and 11):
- 6 Information 1/28/2015 12:50:30 PM Create Backup Archive From: Disk 1 To file: "H:\Acronis_backups\System Disk\System Disk.tib" Compression: Normal Exclude: Files matching mask Match criterion: *.tib, *.tmp, *.~
- 7 Information 1/28/2015 12:50:32 PM Pending operation 158 started: 'Creating partition image'.
- 8 Information 1/28/2015 12:59:49 PM Writing differential version to file: System Disk_diff_b8_s2_v1.tib
- 9 Information 1/28/2015 1:04:19 PM Pending operation 158 started: 'Creating partition image'.
- 10 Warning 1/28/2015 1:04:20 PM Forced sector-by-sector mode.
- 11 Warning 1/28/2015 1:04:20 PM Block bitmap corrupted
- 12 Information 1/28/2015 1:51:00 PM Pending operation 158 started: 'Creating partition image'.
- 13 Information 1/28/2015 1:51:00 PM Pending operation 158 started: 'Creating partition image'.
- 14 Information 1/28/2015 1:51:06 PM Pending operation 155 started: 'Saving partition structure'.
- 15 Information 1/28/2015 1:51:06 PM The following backups have been successfully created: "H:\Acronis_backups\System Disk\System Disk_diff_b8_s2_v1.tib"
I'm assuming that the "block bitmap corrupted" message is being caused by the way data is written when using EXT4 formatting and can be ignored. However I could be wrong on that assumption. I don't think this change in backup method to "sector-by-sector" bothers me because the data has still been backed up successfully (I still need to verify this). I think "sector-by-sector" is just going to take up more space in the backup files than would normally be consumed.
Next steps are to:
- Perform a disk clone of C drive to external drive prior to a backup restoration.
- Restore and verify the most recent TI backup to verify that the backups being made are "good" backups.
I'll post when that's done (hopefully not 6 weeks from now).
As an aside, it only took 4 days to shrink my Windows "C" partition using MS disk management "shrink volume". Yes, very sad. And shadowsports recommendation to disable ASR was spot on. As far as I can tell from forums posts, the file fragment chaining method used for the ASR file is by "physical sector" versus the standard LBN. So asking some defragmentation app to defragment the ASR recovery file will just "break" ASR and the next time you try to boot to ASR, you'll be very disappointed.
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Just wondering how you got on restoring the TI backup pof your ext4 partition which gave you the backup warnings (i.e. forced sector by sector and block bitmap corrupted)? Did they restore successfully?
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The restore of the ext4 partition went perfectly. No issues. And now I *think* I've seen in the Acronis lit about Acronis 2015/16 that this "sector-by-sector" method or "warning msgs" will not be an issue with these latest products. However I haven't upgraded yet from my 2014 to verify this.
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Thanks for the update. I have bought Acronis TI 2016 and am still getting the 'block bitmap corrupted' and 'forced sector by sector' warnings in the log files (which are hard to find and not available via the app). I just tested restoring an ext4 partition and as you say it works well. Error messages are disconcerting however and I think sector by sector mode is slower and the backup takes up more space.
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