Acronis® True Image Home 2009

Another Acronis thread.... boy ATI gets a lot of questions.

I have posted responses to several question in other threads.

ATI Home V11 works fine with 64 bit and many others have reported that Home 2009 does as well.

I will test Home 2009 when I install the final Technet RTM version.

If you are going to use ATI be sure to register your product with ATI Support. That will enable you to download and install the latest update (which is actually an install/repair).

Also, I do NOT recommend using ATI to do partition resizing. It does not handle all combinations of multi-boot/hidden partitions very well and may corrupt the disk. I also don't like Windows Disk Manager "shrink" as it does not deal with MFTs very well.

I use GParted for resizing (don't start the flame crap please, it is what I use and it has worked for me every time).

I will post some links to some answers to some of the more obscure questions about ATI later.

Link on MBR and Track 0
https://www.sevenforums.com/201154-post16.html

General Stuff
https://www.sevenforums.com/122720-post12.html

Attempt to Restore and Image to an unitialized, inactive parttion - this is not recommended - disk should have been cloned.
https://www.sevenforums.com/201590-post19.html

pparks1 said:

Any particular reason that you want to use the Acronis product for making a backup image of your C drive, when the "system image" function built into Windows backup on Win7 is available with the OS??? I've used it many times already and it works great.

If you aren't familiar with it, check it out. Just go into backup tool and the ability to make a "system image" will be listed. It can make it to DVD or a USB hard drive. Then to restore, you just boot with Win7 disc, say "repair", point it at your system image and it puts it all right back.

Windows Backup and Restore is an image only operation I believe, no? It does not support selective backup and restore operations, incremental backups, backup image browsing, etc.

Also depending on which version of Windows 7 the user purchases it may not support backup and restore to network locations.

It does what it does and it is great that MS included it finally but it is still limited compared to 3rd party apps.

squonksc said:

What you can do is install acronis recovery cd only (you can chose during install) -> after install make an acronis recovery cd.

Now do you backups and restore from booting the cd.
The boot version is actually a special linux distro and it doesn't care if your OS is 64 or 32 bits.

And during boot no win files are locked so best chance of good backup/restore.

Good luck.

Again, I do image backups from withing the booted OS all the time. No problems. When doing an image restore I boot to the recovery cd.

noyb said:

I've read that many have used Acronis successfully ..
But it refuses to recover in my computer .. With my disc configuration .. (Long Story)

I'm going to wait on the final Version of W7 .. And the Acronis update.

Cloning works OK .. but recovering from a backup Image is a NoGo.

does this mine i can use 'Create a system image' to make a clone of my HDD to ie. install a higher capacity HDD?

pparks1 said:

First of all, there are 2 things being discussed here. The general purpose Windows backup utility which DOES allow selective backup and restore operations and has for years. The other tool coming to all versions of Windows 7 is the "system image" utility...which is for image purposes and complete PC restoration.

Correct, I did not make the distinction very clear. However, the the "user friendliness" of the traditional NTBackup interface could be debated.

On all other points your expansion on the topics is well said.... but on one aspect my experience has varied considerably....

pparks1 said:

Hopefully the average person makes regular backups to external drives, flash drives or DVD's.

"Hopefully" is the operative word. "Average" users (i.e. those who do not frequent technical forums such as this) do not make regular backups, unless they have already experienced a catastrophic failure and either lost unrecoverable personal data or had to recover it at considerable cost and/or duplication of effort.

But then, there will always be those who never change the oil in their car...

pparks1 said:

You got that right. I'm always amazed...stunned actually...at the number of people who seem to have enough technical skill to

• purchase a computer
• purchase a digital camera and take tons of pics
• get the digital pictures onto their computer
• buy an iPOD, get iTunes installed and get the device synced to pc
• setup something like Microsoft Money or Quicken to manage finances
• obtain, install and use MS Office to put data into spreadsheets

But then, they are too inept/cluless/technically challenged to consider the purchase of a USB drive, plug it an "at least" drag and drop a copy of their files to it on a regular basis.

Hey! We have the same user base in common!
And when they ask me WHY they should have a backup plan, I repeat the age-old saying: "Pay me now or pay me later!"

free hdd cloning, cool!