Acronis
Let me reply to your post first:
I allow Acronis to handle the sets. I backup to a USB external so not sure what you mean by moving them "off line." I build about 5 sets and delete the oldest.
What I was asking was --- Acronis has an "automatic cleanup". But as you seem to infer nothing else was changed so I will assume when you say *I* it means, you are letting Acronis backup, but then you are purging MANUALLY after 5 sets? Either that or you are letting Acronis keep 5 sets and it purges the oldest?
Despite it all I never feel real comfortable with Acronis and the images I have. As Vireya found out, when you image your entire hard drive the first thing Acronis does when restoring is delete the entire contents of your drive. If the restore does not complete the drive will have been deleted.
The only way you will ever know is if you go through the energy to rip the drive out, install another drive and restore from backup and see if it will boot. If it works - then great. If not - no harm no foul - figure out why if you can then and there and/or put back the original drive and figure out after.
When I read what Vireya said (maybe I am wrong; didn't read something correctly) it seemed that the backups were corrupt; he couldn't get to them; and/or never tested them. If there were hardware problems/power spikes etc, then all bets are off. When power is affected anything is possible.
a) If I have lost something critical based on something caused by me (I accidentally deleted a directory or files) then I would restore just those. You can test that today - works for me on XP and Vista with both versions of Acronis.
b) If a program isn't working I tend to reinstall it instead of going to backup.
c) If I decided that I am restoring a backup I am firm in that:
The system is not acting properly.
Something happened, I had to hit RESET and upon boot up things are going really bad - won't get past Windows boot or something else. Trying to fix via a startup disk - googling etc etc not working. Maybe I am getting a BSOD - randomly all of a sudden. Can't figure it out but know 100%, two weeks ago it was fine. Maybe I know what I did. Maybe a bad sector that I don't know of.
Now to go to backup to restore the whole drive is serious. I haven't done this with 2011 on the notebook under Vista. I am tempting fate that it will work. OTOH, what good is a crippled machine? My life cannot continue screwing around with a BSOD or if I cannot get past Windows startup.
As mentioned previously I have for a long time kept BOOT and DATA separate as much as possible. On the notebook I am in a bind as there is only one drive - I backup to the XP over the NIC. On the XP I have drive to drive backups. Desktop/my documents located on D:. Those backups are done outside of Acronis but could be Acronis. Just me.
To me getting a drive restored and ready to boot is different than merely restoring folders - which is why I prefer my critical data to be not on C:. If I could not restore an image on C: then what? I curse at the moon while searching for Windows CDs and start reinstalling. Of course an hour in I am saying "Well I haven't done it in 4 years, so I was due anyways. Besides I haven't lost any data - whatever." Yeah it will take weeks before I am back where I was but a cleaner/faster system.
Years ago with my first non-Apple PC, I had a shiny 386 with a massive 40MB HDD. Hit with a virus - EVERYTHING wiped out. That was the only lesson I needed. Working in the industry doing support for a while, I have seen customer's machines totally wiped out. They weren't pissed that their job data was lost as they were with all their pre-formatted Word templates which take countless hours to perfect.
Soon after whatever machine I got, had two drives, from then onward I have separated C: from everything else. Today I have a 85GB SCSI that is part boot part data - but it could go down tomorrow and couldn't careless really. The data is just some games and misc crap. The real data is elsewhere on the 1.5TB and 2TB drives.
I could not live with a 1.5TB drive knowing it is ONE BIG DRIVE with everything - boot and data. Takes work - I know to separate things. Plus the giant drives makes it tough. But still I would take that 1.5TB and carve it down to say 100GB boot and the rest as data - then have a second drive say 2TB. The 2TB would have my critical data - and I would back that up daily to my 1.5TB data portion. The cost nowadays is nothing - everyone should have two drives.
In all my years, if I need to restore anything it is the boot drive not the others. Viruses typically hit the C: drive - if only boot, so what, if EVERYTHING - good luck. Oh yeah data drives go too - but the boot is the main one. If I install a new Virus program (happened to me) - it is so integrated into the OS that if something goes wrong you are SCREWED. If you only had to deal with 100GB and no "data" then it would be nothing to you to restore it. But if you are talking 1.5TB - yeah I would be afraid too. That is why I don't do it.
Maybe you need to explain more your issue - it is valid and would be helpful to others. But let me add this.
Suppose I am at work and their system crashes and we need to restore from tape. Now half way during the restore the tape rips. Now what? That is pretty disastrous - but life. How do you solve that? Go to the previous tape. Should be the previous night's backup. Personally I have learned to not rely on tapes so mostly for OS & core app recovery only.
Once restores start, you can't think that "well if it had not wiped the drive, then I could have restored my files that were not overwritten with the partial restore". AFAIK most "deleting" occurs at the TOC level not at the data level. There are apps out there that can read RAW data and extract files even with a wiped TOC. But IMO, the moment you "touch" a crippled drive, by restoring, you are entering no mans land. The only time you can be assured of a CHANCE is before you start mucking around with it by restoring.
Not sure what system you have; what you can do (ie crack it open without warranty issues etc; what friends you have) but NOW is the time to test things before any issues occur. At least the energy spent today will go toward peace of mind in the future. If you can get another USB drive, you may be able to restore to that and with the newer MOBOs you CAN BOOT USBs - that would help with testing the restore as well.
IMO you have done only 1/2 the job by backing up. But trust me - that 1/2 only accounts for about 10% of the task. 90% is the recovery and it is only 100% if it works. (for if it doesn't work, then why did you waste time backing up??) You (and everyone) really need to test that recovery out.
Note: Under the right conditions everyone should have 2 drives. But lets say you only have ONE drive, I still believe that ONE drive should be partitioned with "C:" as boot, and "D:" as data. Again, if a VIRUS hits, then you can lose the entire C: drive. Acronis can back up "just" C: and restore "just" C:. With Vista they added more partition tools. With XP I had to rely on Partition Magic. I am sure Win7 likewise has tools. On VISTA I did exactly that - have C:, D:, S: & T: drives on the piddly 250GB drive. You can move data around without having to reinstall.
Now, back to my problem. Not much to say except - when I moved all the files except for the last backup to another folder the last archive file was:
P5(5)19.tib
Thursday should have been:
P5(5)20.tib / P5(5)21.tib
Instead, because P5*,P5(1)*,P5(2)*,P5(3)*,P5(4)* were all moved away, today's incrementals were labeled: P55191.tib P5519121.tib
I give up. I am going to fix it so on Sunday night it will rename directories and will see how that goes. I will write a Python app to rename and they throw up a GUI message to "offload" that is my "memory" to trigger the process to turn on my offline and move it off. Should work better.
Cheers Raptech!
Blake |
