I think I'm going to buy Acronis True Image Home for imaging, but I'd like to know how it works in a nut shell (never used imaging software before). I have 2 hard drives and I'd like to copy an image of one drive to the other, so do you plug both drives into your system and use Acronis?
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How does Acronis work?
- Thread starter j3ff86
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This is another one of my MEGAPOSTS so, bearing that in mind, it's useful information, so read it, don't read it, your loss. 
When you get True Image and install it, there are two primary components:
1) The Windows version. It installs a service that runs in the background all the time, allows for scheduling images/backups based on its own internal scheduling ability that you can modify. That service is not what does the actual imaging, however, but fires up the True Image application (the Windows version itself) and does the imaging in the background. The cool thing about True Image (and a few other imaging apps nowadays) is live imaging meaning you don't have to reboot just to make an image.
You will always have to shut down and reboot the computer to restore an image of a system drive, however - that is a given as the restoration process needs total unfettered control of the hard drive and all the data being written to the drive. You can't overwrite some system files when Windows is in operation, so restoring an image of a system partition will force a reboot. If you had images of other partitions (non-system ones) you can restore them as required using the Windows client.
2) Once the Windows software is installed, you use the Recovery Media creator to make the True Image Recovery CD. That's the same software, basically, on a bootable CD that you can use outside of Windows if something so totally hoses your machine that you can't even get Windows to run - if that's the case, you sure couldn't use True Image to restore the machine since you can't even run it.
The Recovery Media CD is the same software, just on a bootable CD. When it boots and loads, you'll be looking at essentially the same window, the same icons, etc. It's pretty slick for what it is, truly. I pesonally don't use the Windows version of True Image, I only install it long enough to create the CD and then I uninstall it from that point on and just use the CD for making images every so often.
Last cool feature;
The Acronis Recovery Manager can create a tiny portion of your hard drive space (doesn't need to be much, but you can assign as much as you wish) for what's called the Secure Zone. It's a non-visible partition at the back end of a hard drive in a partition type that's inaccessible by most OSes so it's "invisible" to Windows, meaning you can't fuck it up.
The Recovery Manager gets installed to the boot record on the drive, and some actual code (the software itself) gets installed to that Secure Zone and from that point on, when you boot the computer, before Windows starts to load, you'll get a 3 second prompt to run True Image itself directly off the hard drive without needing the CD if you press F11. Comes in really handy sometimes.
The Secure Zone is also a place you can store the images you create, as long as you make it large enough.
The trick with this type of imaging is the compression. The Normal compression ratio is 2:1, and there's absolutely no reason to alter it. Switching the compression to High means it'll take upwards of 5x longer to compress and make an image for a very small increase in compression overall. It's not worth the extended amount of time, so leave the Normal compression as it is and run with it.
A tip about what's on the drive:
True Image works by taking the raw bits on the platters and working with them - it doesn't give a shit about filesystems, that has nothing to do with it as most people don't understand. It doesn't care if it's an NTFS filesystem, FAT32, FAT, HFS+, Ext3, etc. It's not relevant because all it does is see a partition that starts at <xxx> bit and ends at <yyy> bit and then it goes to work on the content from <xxx> to <yyy>. It looks at the sectors on the drive which are 512 bytes long - again, the filesystem doesn't matter in this equation - and then works with the data it finds.
It doesn't image empty space, it just puts placeholders to say "Ok, it's empty from sector <aaa> to sector <bbb> so nothing there." If you've got a 320GB hard drive, one partition, with 60GB of data on it, it's already noted the gap from 60GB to 320GB (the end of the drive) and then focuses on 60GB.
Regarding compression:
Movie files (AVI, QuickTime, Real, MPEG, etc) don't compress much if at all - they're already compressed. Audio files (mp3, AAC, Ogg, etc) don't compress much either - they're already compressed. WAV files aren't compressed and do pretty well when crunched, actually. DVD rips, forget it - already compressed. Most stuff people collect these days already is, even images. Some stuff like big TIFF files can compress nicely, but GIFs and JPGs are already crunched.
The point is this:
If you have 60GB of data, and 40GB of it is music, movies, pictures, etc, you're not going to get much space savings off that, if any. If the other 20GB of content is highly compressible data: documents, .dll files, the OS itself, will typically compress to a 2:1 ratio, meaning the end result would be about half the size the files normally are.
60GB with 40GB of non-compressible data and 20GB of compressible will end up with an image around 50GB or so. Just keep these things in mind when it comes to making system partition images as that's the most common use for imaging software:
Backing up the system partition (or drive if you use the whole thing). That's where splitting partitions into smaller system partitions and leaving the rest for other partitions for storage, etc. Making an image of a system partition is easier - especially if it's smaller - than trying to back up 500, 640, 750, or even 1TB of data or more as the system partition with the OS is the most important partition of all.
That's about it. If you've got other questions, just ask.
Good luck...
When you get True Image and install it, there are two primary components:
1) The Windows version. It installs a service that runs in the background all the time, allows for scheduling images/backups based on its own internal scheduling ability that you can modify. That service is not what does the actual imaging, however, but fires up the True Image application (the Windows version itself) and does the imaging in the background. The cool thing about True Image (and a few other imaging apps nowadays) is live imaging meaning you don't have to reboot just to make an image.
You will always have to shut down and reboot the computer to restore an image of a system drive, however - that is a given as the restoration process needs total unfettered control of the hard drive and all the data being written to the drive. You can't overwrite some system files when Windows is in operation, so restoring an image of a system partition will force a reboot. If you had images of other partitions (non-system ones) you can restore them as required using the Windows client.
2) Once the Windows software is installed, you use the Recovery Media creator to make the True Image Recovery CD. That's the same software, basically, on a bootable CD that you can use outside of Windows if something so totally hoses your machine that you can't even get Windows to run - if that's the case, you sure couldn't use True Image to restore the machine since you can't even run it.
The Recovery Media CD is the same software, just on a bootable CD. When it boots and loads, you'll be looking at essentially the same window, the same icons, etc. It's pretty slick for what it is, truly. I pesonally don't use the Windows version of True Image, I only install it long enough to create the CD and then I uninstall it from that point on and just use the CD for making images every so often.
Last cool feature;
The Acronis Recovery Manager can create a tiny portion of your hard drive space (doesn't need to be much, but you can assign as much as you wish) for what's called the Secure Zone. It's a non-visible partition at the back end of a hard drive in a partition type that's inaccessible by most OSes so it's "invisible" to Windows, meaning you can't fuck it up.
The Recovery Manager gets installed to the boot record on the drive, and some actual code (the software itself) gets installed to that Secure Zone and from that point on, when you boot the computer, before Windows starts to load, you'll get a 3 second prompt to run True Image itself directly off the hard drive without needing the CD if you press F11. Comes in really handy sometimes.
The Secure Zone is also a place you can store the images you create, as long as you make it large enough.
The trick with this type of imaging is the compression. The Normal compression ratio is 2:1, and there's absolutely no reason to alter it. Switching the compression to High means it'll take upwards of 5x longer to compress and make an image for a very small increase in compression overall. It's not worth the extended amount of time, so leave the Normal compression as it is and run with it.
A tip about what's on the drive:
True Image works by taking the raw bits on the platters and working with them - it doesn't give a shit about filesystems, that has nothing to do with it as most people don't understand. It doesn't care if it's an NTFS filesystem, FAT32, FAT, HFS+, Ext3, etc. It's not relevant because all it does is see a partition that starts at <xxx> bit and ends at <yyy> bit and then it goes to work on the content from <xxx> to <yyy>. It looks at the sectors on the drive which are 512 bytes long - again, the filesystem doesn't matter in this equation - and then works with the data it finds.
It doesn't image empty space, it just puts placeholders to say "Ok, it's empty from sector <aaa> to sector <bbb> so nothing there." If you've got a 320GB hard drive, one partition, with 60GB of data on it, it's already noted the gap from 60GB to 320GB (the end of the drive) and then focuses on 60GB.
Regarding compression:
Movie files (AVI, QuickTime, Real, MPEG, etc) don't compress much if at all - they're already compressed. Audio files (mp3, AAC, Ogg, etc) don't compress much either - they're already compressed. WAV files aren't compressed and do pretty well when crunched, actually. DVD rips, forget it - already compressed. Most stuff people collect these days already is, even images. Some stuff like big TIFF files can compress nicely, but GIFs and JPGs are already crunched.
The point is this:
If you have 60GB of data, and 40GB of it is music, movies, pictures, etc, you're not going to get much space savings off that, if any. If the other 20GB of content is highly compressible data: documents, .dll files, the OS itself, will typically compress to a 2:1 ratio, meaning the end result would be about half the size the files normally are.
60GB with 40GB of non-compressible data and 20GB of compressible will end up with an image around 50GB or so. Just keep these things in mind when it comes to making system partition images as that's the most common use for imaging software:
Backing up the system partition (or drive if you use the whole thing). That's where splitting partitions into smaller system partitions and leaving the rest for other partitions for storage, etc. Making an image of a system partition is easier - especially if it's smaller - than trying to back up 500, 640, 750, or even 1TB of data or more as the system partition with the OS is the most important partition of all.
That's about it. If you've got other questions, just ask.
Good luck...