Windows 7: acronis just failed me. What's an easy backup scheme?

I made an Acronis true image backup of my Windows 7 main drive and after a drive failure it won't restore. So after a clean install I'm now looking for program (that works well in 7) to clone and restore the main drive if needed.



Also, I now have a dual boot setup so I'd be looking for something that on corruption I could boot into working syste mdrive and restore an image to the non-working system drive.

Thanks for any info!

Out of curiosity, what version of Acronis were you using?

Ditto pparks1 - and when you say it didn't restore, what exactly happened?

I use a program called Spotmau
Spotmau.com - Computer Service

Clones/Images perfectly every time as well as many other things it does

Steve

In what sense will it not restore?

Does Acronis recognize the .tib image?

Is it corrupted?

I can open the .tib file and browse through the C: drive but, I'd like to restore the file to an individual partition but it's blocked out so I can't. I guess you can't restore to partitions only full drives?
Ideally, I'd like to just have image backups ready to restore to individual system partitions. I'm far from an IT backup type guru so maybe I'm going about this wrong?

Is the partition you want to restore to smaller than the original one you made the image of?

I don't know if your app. would be able to do that. The Paragon I have can do it - but I think that is an unusual ability.


If it is - you are going to have enlarge that partition so it is a little larger than the original.

Probably don't need a partition - Unallocated space should be fine to restore to - but it may still need to be the same or larger than the original .

still kinda confused about what happened, bounce. You've got 2 HDs?

Just one, but it had a few partitions on it. I tried to backup from .tib file to a single partition, but Acronis seems to only backup to a full drive and not let an individual partition be a target for backup.

I've now clean installed twice so I have a dual bootup setup and an empty partion. I'd like to find a program that will easily let me clone and restore to a "partition" on one hard drive. Does that make sense? thanks

I use Windows 7 backup imaging on all seven of my machines, saving image to a primary formatted partition on the HDD or secondary, copied to an external.

I have had to boot into the Windows 7 installer>Repair console>Recover Using an Image about a dozen times now to reimage my HDD or another and it has never failed me yet. I even send the image over the network, just popping it into the root where is auto-detected if kept by it's same assigned name.

It isn't as fancy as the paid programs, or even Macrium free, but it is reliable so far and built in, perfect for introducing ordinary users to backup imaging and never having to reinstall again.