You should create the rescue CD.  If the hard drive fails or if the Operating System is corrupted you will need to boot with the rescue CD in order to restore the hard drive from your backup.

 

I still have no idea on your locations question.

Thanks for the prompt reply.  I am still stumped at the Backup Location area of the program.  I originally did my first backup telling the program to backup to a particular drive.  Now, when I do a backup, it always backs up there.  I do not see any way to change that in the future, if needed.

Also, I always want to do full backups.  When I start a background task that I created earlier, will it:

A)  Overwrite the original file with a full backup?

B)  Just do an incremental backup, even thou the task was created telling it to do a full backup?

C)  Add a new full backup file to my USB drive?

 

Thanks for your help

hi, I use Acronis 9.  I back up to an external hard disk, and I use incremental back ups.  At the relevant page I just choose the previous back up and tell Acronis to add to that.  If you keep doing full back ups the target drive would soon get filled up.  I had to use my image yesterday (the second time I have needed to image the drive), I'm not sure if this is the norm but it took just over two hours.  And yes you need to create the boot cd, if it comes to it you have to plug in the drive the image is on, then insert the cd, then reboot the computer. This might be a good time for you to check on the net for the tutorial - you should be able to locate it on the Acronis Forum site so look for Acronis 11, there are pictures of the various screens.  HTH.

 

 

Thanks for your help.  I looked at the Acronis site and could not find a tutoriial.  I will look again and try to find the forums.

Here is another question.  I did a full backup and I see it under "my computer" in Windows as one file on my USB 250 gig backup hard drive.  This file is only about 30 megabites.  That seems pretty small.  I used normal compression for the backup.  I have 45 GB on my hard drive filled up on my system.  Does 45gb get compressed down to only 30mb? 

I just want to make sure EVERYTHING is indeed in that backup file that was created.

Thanks

 

this is an interesting one - I have never looked at the size of each drive image I do. I use normal compression as well as incremental backups, so I will check what My Computer reports about each image.  30 MB does seem small in relation to compressing 45GB of info.  I'm not saying it is wrong though, as I have never checked. I use a 40 gig usb external drive for the images and have quite a lot so far, and earlier this year I checked the amount of space on the drive.  There was quite a lot free at that time.

Good Grief.....do I feel stupid.  I looked again and it was 30GB, not 30MB.  And, that is very logical. I went on line and studied typical backup file compression.  I read that one may be able to compress UP TO 10 times the amount of data on a disk.  That is if the files are not the type that are already compressed like mp3s and video.  I would assume JPGs would fall into that catgory too since they are a compression type of file.

I was able to solve my problem of not being able to do multiple backups and have each file listed separately in "My Computer".  I had a great and helpfull "chat" session with Acronis.  They had me uninstall and reinstall the program.  Then I made sure I created backup locations by looking under THAT heading in the file tree.  NOT the location down below under "computer".  Since I originally made that mistake, that  is why I had to reinstall the program.  The software just would'nt let go of my original mistake.

Thanks for your help.

your welcome, glad you got that issue sorted.  I think you were wise to ask Acronis about the back up location.

You can download the True Image 11 user guide from

 

http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

 

(on the right under 'Learn More')