Disk Imaging of W8. Would this work ?

Hypothetical question for me at the moment because I had to abandon my W8 dual boot because of unresolved start up and shut down errors... however,

The question is this.

A program such as Acronis TI is designed to work and run from "within" Windows and as such the version of Acronis used has to be compatable with the OS. So an older version of TI won't for example work with Vista or W7. So far so good.


What would happen then if you used Acronis "outside" of the OS you wanted to back up (W8 for example) ?

So for a single boot W8 install, could any version of Acronis be run from the Acronis CD and successfully image a W8 install. My reasoning is that Acronis itself has no knowledge of the OS and simply makes an image of what is on a partition. If so could it perform incremental backups too, such that if an image were restored from these it would be successful ?

And for a dual boot, well if you have for example Acronis running in Vista, could you then run Acronis as normal from Vista and image the (non active) W8 partition ?

I have imaged Windows 8 with free Macrium. There is no reason Acronis would not be able to do that too.

Yes, I can't really think of any good reason why it would not.

I wouldn't really agree that it is designed to run from inside the OS. It certainly has that function, as part of the program, but it also has the alternative of making a bootable Acronis disk. I use this most of the time - I guess this may be what you mean by using it "outside". I normally have a dual boot installation. I make images from the Acronis cd on a regular basis, of Windows 8, or windows 7, or both. Any portion of those images can be restored. I have, on occasion, run the program from within either OS. But, in this case, it reboots anyway so why bother.

Clonezilla is awesome to make 1:1 copies of drives or partitions.

Thanks Dave, good to hear it works OK running it from the CD.

I've only ever run Acronis from a CD, I figure if you have to boot up, you might as well boot straight onto the CD, it's very quick. Acronis has certainly saved me a lot of time over the years.

Windows built in file recovery works well for me.

I keep an original image then use the automatic feature to make a new one each week on another partition.

Unlike Windows system recovery "go back" feature, the images made with file recovery always work perfectly.

Thanks for all your thoughts folks...

I may get to try this for real when W8 RTM releases 'cos I'm sure to want another play.

I actually use Acronis daily and my strategy is this. I perform weekly (7 or 8 in a backup tree) incrementals but I always run it from Vista and put the images on my D partition. Those are my running incrementals I can restore from anytime. I also make a full weekly image and put that on a separate HDD. (It's so much quicker (for me) restoring from the same HDD than a separate one). Maybe because of USB speed limitations. Conversly it's that much quicker making a full image to a separate disk.

It always puzzled me how you could make an image of an OS that was in use and that if you restored that image it would be correct as if it had just booted up. Running Acronis from the CD to get an image of the dormant OS always seemed the best method but Acronis apparently say not and that running from within the OS is always the preferred method. It's certainly convenient and has never failed me.

"Running Acronis from the CD to get an image of the dormant OS always seemed the best method but Acronis apparently say not and that running from within the OS is always the preferred method."

Never read that myself? My box had a bootable CD already made.although the option is there to make your own. But, in the handbook, it comments on the use of the bootable CD. If you have already made the CD, no problem. Bu if you are (unlikely) relying only on the Installed Acronis, you would have a minor disaster on your hands should that particular HD fail

I restore images after attempts and tests of new software. Other than that, the main function for me is in the event of bsods or failures to boot correctly. Can happen if you are an experimenter, quite often. Running from within the OS would, naturally, be difficult under those circumstances.

Hi there

1) Boot version of Acronis is essentially a Stand alone Linux OS -- it can image any partition containing a File system that it can handle - which includes NTFS and a host of others -- So long as it can "See" the disks you want to image or restore -- no problem. The Partition image is just "Data" as far as Acronis running in its own OS is concerned (The stand alone boot version) -- although it does have a few tricks to make data recovery / restore quicker such as ignoring empty sectors etc -- but you CAN force it into a sector by sector restore if you really want to.

2) If you run Acronis from say something like a Win 2 Go W8 usb device or a "Hirens CD with a Mini Windows in it" as the normal Acronis program it will still be able to copy / restore images on any disks these OS's can see.

3) Unless you have a Server version you will only be able to image Partitions attached either via a USB or directly connected to the local machine.

4) The DATA (images) can be saved on any device the local machine is able to access -- including networked drives.

5) DATA and Directory backups (as opposed to Disk Images) can be backed up and restored to any device the computer has access to - again networked drives if applicable.

Hope this "de fuzzes" the issue.

Other software might do all these too -- I've use Acronis over the years so I'm answering from what I know Acronis can do. IMO it's still a lot faster than Macrium although you do have to pay for it (not much) -- and one 30 minute restore alone canl save you hours of Windows re-installs, application installs. serial number possible problems, Windows / Office updates and application updates. Well worth the 40 or so USD for the product.

(Final remark -- the reason why running Acronis from Within the OS is mentioned -- with Windows you've got the whole "Address space" plus all the complex multi-tasking of the OS to allow the product to run at its maximum performance.

The stand alone (bootable) version is a very stripped down bare Linux OS designed to run with as minimum of hardware requirements as possible and minimum memory requirements as it's intended to be used on "Bare Metal" recovery. As a consequence the performance won't be anything like as optimized as when running under Windows. The Stand alone CD version is designed just to Boot and run on as bare minimum hardware as possible.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi Jimbo,
Thanks for the detailed reply. I was just reading the pdf manual of TI10 and that recommends or at least implies running under Windows as the preferred choice and that you resort to the other methods only when the system is totally unbootable.

I agree how useful Acronis is. When I clean installed Vista I did a running incremental as the updates and service packs progressed (just in case) and I also have a "Just Vista" image that is up to date update wise but with no additional programs installed (other than Acronis) which allows me to do a clean install and rebuild if I wish.


I should really make a new bootable disc even though I have the retail version because I updated TI to a new build. I think they say you can go back and use a version "one build older" for restoring from the CD.

Thanks... it's slowly getting de-fuzzed

Old thread, but my experience.

Win 7 running on two separate partitions.

Backup win 7 partition using true image 2011 from alternate win 7 partition.

Update the backed up partition to win 8. Fine.

Backup Win 8 using TrueImage from Win 7 system.

Restore to Win 7. Fine.

Restore back to Win 8. Driver error while attempting to boot. No recovery I can find. So it appears a Win 8 image taken via True Image 2011 can NOT be used for recovery. If anyone has successfully done it, please let me know how.

Cheers