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What devices should the Acronis bootable media be able to see?

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Here's the question. Some background and history below.

What devices should the Acronis bootable media be able to see in the event of a catastrophe?

There are reports in this forum that the bootable media from ATI 2015 cannot see a USB external drive. I found that to be true.
Should the bootable media be able to see a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device? How about a personal cloud, such as Western Digital (WD) My Cloud?

Background.....
I was preparing to replace my existing HDD on my laptop (5 years old) with a new, larger one. I researched the methods. My backups are on a USB external HDD, but the ATI 2015 bootable media would not see it or access it. I am glad I tested that!!
It seems that it will not see a NAS or a personal cloud either.
My wife's computer backs up to the personal cloud (WD My Cloud). So, if she had a big problem, I could not recover easily.
Acronis support sent me a "custom" ISO file to boot from. This was able to see the external USB drive.

I was able to successfully follow the clone procedure using this custom ISO and now have a new. larger drive in my laptop.

But going forward, I need to know what devices the bootable media can/should access. Then I can use those devices for my back up. I prefer to not have to buy an external drive for my wife's machine.

Cheers,

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Your question is not easily answered. In general terms any device for which the Linux kernel used in the recovery media has drivers can be seen. You were wise to test your hardware first before relying on a device being reachable with the recovery media based simply on the fact that the app in Windows can backup to it. The only sure way to know is by testing unfortunately.

I'm dealing with this right now. I had to restore my OS to a new HD, installed Acronis 2105, and now I'm trying to restore my backup .tib files (full partition images) from my NAS share that I had been backing up to (full backup after every 5 incremental)

I tried to do a recovery, it couldn't see the NAS share that I had added the backup with, obviously it seems there's no drivers for the WiFI adapter, my laptop doesn't have an ethernet port. I have a USB LAN adapter, but i doubt there's drivers for that either.

I am now going through the 4 hour process of copying my .tib files to a USB HD on the NAS. Does this mean Acronis isn't going to see my USB HD? I would consider this an EXTREMELY BASIC requirement for being able to recover my system.

I'll let you guys know if it works or not.

So, the story has a half-way good ending. I am left somewhat angry, though.

After spending way too much of my time trying to get a USB drive to work, I eventually created a WinPE USB Stick to boot from. I was able to get that to work as long as I waited until it asked me for the location of my .tib files before I plugged my USB drive with the files on it in.

I was then able to restore my partitions to the disk. But with one problem. I do a full backup with a 5x incremental, then another full backup that cleans up after itself after every 5 incrementals(weekly on saturdays). The main reason for this is I don't have the disk space on my NAS to just let this build up forever. I had backups up to 1/28/2015, but it only restored the full, which was 12/28. I lost a month worth of stuff. What's the point of the incremental if it's not going to actually restore all my data? I did notice there were two "full" files, one obviously not correct as it was only 50G instead of the 380-ish Gigabytes it should have been.

I'm attaching a file with a screenshot of the state of my backups. If it was in a bad state that would prevent me from being able to restore my most up to date version of my partitions, why wouldn't it let me know this or fix it on it's own?

Anyone have any idea why that would have happened?

EDIT: OK I feel silly now. I had to actually select the last incremental as the .tib to recover. By selecting the full I only recovered that and not the incrementals. Sorry! All's well. :)

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Jon:

A comment about your observation that there are two full backup files and one isn't correct because it's only 50 GB. The first two "full" files in your picture are the full backup made on 12/28/2014. The program split the full backup into two volumes (files) either because you specified a maximum split size or because of the requirements of your NAS. If you look at the filenames, the last part of the name, _v1 and _v2, refer to volume 1 and volume 2 of the backup. If you add the two file sizes together they add up to 310 GB, the total size of your full backup.

Both files are needed to restore. If select one of them to restore the program will find and use both. If you delete one of them then you won't be able to restore that full backup.

The file might also be split if the connection is interrupted for some reason or another. This might vary depending on the computer. For example in my house I have a Lenovo laptop that refuses to complete a full backup without splitting it on wireless, but all other computers achieve a whole full backup without problem :-)
When you see a single TIB file slit in pieces and you didn't limit the size of the archive files, make sure you double click on any TIB subsequently created. YOu might see a pop up window saying "cannot locate volume X). Knowing that Volume 1 is the first file of the chain, etc. simply select browse and point at the right file. Once ATI has restablished the right file tracking, double click again to verify the archive file opens normally with Windows Explorer. The backup should validate normally then.