Tips on using Acronis

Slightly unusual setup there Laura. The 199MB partition contains your boot files but these would normally be on C, your Windows partition, so you need both. You don't need to include the Recovery partition, in fact you don't need that at all with Acronis, and you might want just one image with the Tools partition included and omit that from subsequent backups. Always do a Full backup, not Incremental, add a few comments and away you go.

 

This is interesting. I always thought that Windows 7 created a 100MB partition on a new install. I wonder why it would be 199MB on a HP? I remember that Microsoft originally had it at 200MB on the beta but brought it down 100MB on the RTM.

 

No it does not. As Earthling says, it contains the boot files. That is why it is listed as Active on your image. It is called the System Reserved Partition and was created to increase stability and I believe it is also used for Bitlocker. As Earthling said, when you should image the C partition and the System Reserved Partition at the same time.

 

Mine was a clean install of Win 7 Ult 64-bit and there's no 100MB partition here. The other two 50GB primaries in the pic are for other OSs, one hidden atm and the other empty, and all the logicals are data partitions. No 100MB at all. Maybe that's because I use Grub4DOS as boot manager rather than the standard Windows MBR. :confused

 

I have more of an issue with the size of mine :-o But no, as long as you always include both and restore both together, no issue at all.

 

@LauraR -you probably know all this but just in case - always run a validation after creating your image, and at least once go through the process of setting up a restoration, right up to the point of clicking Proceed. That's a 99% guarantee that should you need it it will work.

 

Okay, first essential is to create the Rescue CD from the Tools & Utilities menu, reboot to it, and using either Backup or Recovery check that you can see both the drive containing your backup and the drive to which you would want it restored. There's never any problem with the latter but sometimes there is with the former. You would need this CD to restore your two system partitions, though not to restore other partitions, as that can be done from the installed program. That's the absolutely essential bit done but you might want to click Recovery > Browse for Backups and see if you have any issue with selecting the actual backup file and specific partitions within it to be restored, and the drive and partitions to which they should be restored. Ppl often find this bit confusing where the backup contains more than one partition so it's best to practice it now rather than in the panic state of having to do it for real

Validation - there is a Validation tool in the Rescue CD but it's not the easiest thing to find and it's far easier to do it from Windows Explorer by right clicking your tib file and clicking Archive > Validate. (For other readers this is ATIH 2010 or 2011 and might be different in earlier versions). All you will see is an icon in the notification area and imo it's best to right click that and click Status so you can see the validation process for yourself. If you don't do that it will not give you any messages at all unless validation fails, and the icon will just eventually disappear. That's not satisfactory imo.

It's really essential to go through this familiarisation and proving process to be certain that if disaster does strike you will be ceratin of being able to recover quickly.

Don't hesitate to ask if you need further info, but if it's me you want then do it today as we are off for some sun tomorrow for nearly a month. :cool