Acronis disk copy. Creating an exact copy of the system with all programs using Acronis True Image

Acronis True Image, backup life.

Hello, hello, dear friends. Let's continue to talk about our main solution for home users.

Acronis True Image is a product with a rich history. We tried to listen carefully to our customers, and therefore a lot of different kinds of functionality have accumulated in the product, which is designed to protect user data in one way or another. Actually, in this issue we decided to tell you about the different types of backups supported by Acronis True Image.

Before diving into the variations of backup methods, let's briefly describe the general approach. All our backups are done via snapshot: either through our own or through the Volume Shadow Copy Service. Accordingly, you can continue to work with the computer, change or delete data - the moment of the snapshot creation will be recorded in the backup copy.

1. Disk backup.

So, now let's discuss the backup methods. The first and most powerful way that protects everyone and everything and allows you not only to save your data, but also to get back to work as quickly as possible is with a disk backup. You can protect an entire disk, partition, dynamic disks, all kinds of raids are supported, etc. This method frees you from having to choose what to protect - just make a copy of everything that is, and come what may.

You can set up data rotation in different ways. For example, create an always full backup and overwrite the previous one:

Of course, a lot of storage space will be wasted.

To use space more efficiently, you should use an incremental backup: only the data that has changed since the last copy will be copied. But in this case, for data recovery, we will need the entire chain of copies, since the new copies depend on the previous ones.

Differential backups do not have this drawback. They copy data that has changed not from the last backup, as incremental, but from the very first copy. Thus, the versions only depend on the very first backup. Accordingly, you can afford to lose some intermediate versions:

Backups can be stored on USB drives, network folders, FTP servers, CD / DVD, etc. Earlier, we also described creating a backup to the Acronis cloud.

2. Cloning a disk

Disk cloning will make an exact copy of your disk on another disk in sector mode. This will allow you to get back to work in case of problems with the first disk, simply by booting your computer from the second disk. You don't even need to wait for data recovery.

3. File backup.

Well, the last way to create backups for today is to copy your files. In this case, all the options and options for storing copies are the same as for a disk backup.

Why do you need file backups, if you can make a complete copy of the disk? There are options here. A disk copy can be made, for example, relatively infrequently, and thus save storage space. But copies of your work files can be made every hour or even every 5 minutes (we will talk about this in detail in the next article). For example, this is exactly what I do:

How do you protect your data?

Imagine this situation: you bought a computer or laptop with an installed operating system, everything suits you, time passes, a year, or maybe two you have already accumulated a large database of various, important information, files: for example, a large collection of photos, installed games, films, documents and at one point, the system crashes, there can be a lot of reasons, ranging from viruses to the fact that you simply turned off the light, and you do not have an uninterruptible power supply to safely shut down the system.

What to do, tell me, how is it that the system does not work correctly, everything slows down, half of the desktop is not there, and even worse windows 7 does not load at all, do you really need to reinstall the windows 7 system, and you don't even know, and there is no installation disk, really all is lost and you need to start all over again? Do not worry, everything is fixable and now we will consider it!

To produce, we will use the program Acronis True Image Home 2013, believe me - this is the best and highest quality program for backing up and restoring the windows system, of course, every high-quality product is paid and if you value your windows system and you have extra money, then of course it is better to buy a product once and protect yourself, but if you feel sorry for money, then you will need to look carefully on the Internet (just be careful), otherwise a broken product can play a cruel joke with you. Well, if you haven't found anything on the Internet yourself, then write to me through the feedback form, I'll try to help.

So, let's begin. I want to say right away that we will not deal with the description of the program and the global setting in this article for this, there will be separate articles on this program, so I think it is worth subscribing to the update of articles through the subscription form. Open Acronis True Image Home, the main window with prompts will open in front of you in order to create a windows 7 system image, click on the button "System backup".

In the window that opens, we look at the items that I marked with numbers.

Select partitions for backup, be sure to select (Partition without a name is the system bootloader) and (Local disk "C"), if your hard disk is divided into several partitions, you can select them or then separately create a backup copy of these partitions.
Choose a place to save the backup copy - it can be a hard disk partition or various drives, of course, for storing a system image, it is better to use a removable hard disk or a second hard disk if you have several of them.
You can write a name for the backup or leave it as default.
Be sure to open the Disk Backup Options tab. In the settings window that opens, check the "Check backup after creation" box and click "Ok".
After all that has been done, we press the button "Archive".

The whole process has started and it will be necessary to wait for the program to execute. It took me about 40 minutes, but it's worth it.

After you finish creating an image of the windows 7 system, you can go to the section where the copy was saved and look at the system created by Beckup. Now, with the help of the created backup, you can easily restore the complete windows 7 system with all the information and settings in the form in which it was, by pressing just one button.

But that's not all, system failures can be different, okay, if the failure was not significant and windows 7 booted, you can easily open the backup and restore the system, but what if the boot does not occur? A small setting in the program will help us here. Open the "Tools and Utilities" item and open the "Startup Recovery" tab.

Here I will show you how to create an image using Acronis True Image.
In other articles I have already talked about and. Now it's time to create an image for a quick system recovery.

So. We have a fully configured operating system (in my case, Windows 7), all the programs are installed and everything works as we need. Fine.

Reboot your computer and see a screen that asks you to press F11 to start Acronisa. This is just how the safety zone works.

Press F11 and Acronis starts loading. After downloading, a window will appear that prompts you for actions. In my case, this is either starting Acronis True Image Home or starting Windows. Choose Acronis True Image Home

The following screenshots are taken from under Windows, but I advise you to do everything in the Acronis Secure Zone. The settings are the same. 🙂

Selecting Data Archiving:

We will be greeted by the Acronis Backup Wizard. Click further

In the next step, select Disks and Partitions and poke further.

We indicate the disk, the image of which we want to make. I have Windows on the C: drive, so I select it. I press further.

The advice will come out something like this. I usually push just further, but if you wish, you can read 🙂

In the next step, select the location for storing the archive. We select the Acronis Secure Zone, since it is not visible from under Windows, and therefore viruses will not touch it. 🙂 When choosing a security zone, you do not need to specify the name of our archive. Just click next.

In the next step, check the Use default settings box, and click next.

And now all the steps for setting up the image creation are completed. We press to start.

The creation of an image of your OS will begin.

At the end, a sign will appear stating that the image has been successfully created. Reboot 🙂

Everything. Now you can completely virus the entire C: drive, completely crash Windows, etc. etc. after all, the image of the configured system is already there. And it will recover within 5 minutes.

A great way to say thank you.

Restoring an operating system after a serious unforeseen failure is, alas, not as simple a task as it seems to many users and manufacturers of numerous "miracle utilities". For all its importance, usefulness and relevance, most of the available software suffers from many flaws. The saddest thing is the active promotion of "half-hearted" solutions by Microsoft itself, because the tools for creating "restore points" that have appeared in Windows for a long time cannot be called an exhaustive solution.

What is left to do for those users who want to have real insurance in the event of an emergency? There are very few high-quality utilities designed to restore (note, complete) OS performance, and most of them are designed for a trained user or even a system administrator.

Convenient and easy-to-use program

Acronis True Image Home (ATIH) Is a rare example of a utility that is friendly to an ordinary user, which not only performs its functions of reanimating a crashed system, but also does it in the most understandable and accessible form. Certain knowledge of the operating system features from the user is still required, but with some desire to "run" through all the stages of backup without any problems. By the way, this is what we will do today.

A small theoretical background

The principle of the utility is actually quite simple. It creates a hidden partition on the disk that is inaccessible to the OS, into which a complete copy of the system disk is saved. The volume of recorded data is quite significant, so the procedure, to put it mildly, requires a certain amount of time. After that, the utility modifies the Windows bootloader and offers to initiate a system restore. If there is no need for this (that is, the user has not pressed a specific hot button), the OS starts up normally.

Attention! We traditionally use only the latest software versions, so it is possible that in earlier builds the interface and the location of the controls will differ from what we give below. Used version of the program:ATIH v18.0 build 6525 .

Initial creation of a hidden partition (security zone)

Attention! After that, you will be prompted to restart your computer. The system will make the necessary changes in the system partition, and after one more restart, the initial placement of the "security zone" can be considered complete.

Making a backup

Attention! The process of creating a backup is very, very leisurely, and depending on the amount of data, the speed of the hard disk and the workload of the computer, it can take quite a long time.

Restoring a partition from a backup

Select "Backup" in the main window of the program.
In the second column, mark the required archive, and in the menu of the main window of the section (the lower right corner of the program screen) click the "Recover disks" block.
Check the box next to the hard disk partition to which the backup will be deployed, make sure everything is done correctly and click "Restore now".

Attention! This procedure will completely destroy the data of the entire system partition, so be as careful as possible. It will become impossible to recover deleted information after the operation has started!

Start restoring from a backup

Activating Startup Repair

Left-click on the "Tools" item in the vertical toolbar of the main Acronis True Image Home window, select the "More tools" section in the right window, and then the line "Activate Startup Repair".
Click the "Activate" item and wait for the operation to complete.

Create a boot disk

This may be required if it is impossible to start a regular recovery through the security zone. This sometimes happens when the main Windows boot loader is damaged, a critical system or hardware failure. In this case, an external disk (USB or DVD) will help to reanimate the system, on which the portable version of Acronis will be previously recorded.

A few important notes

Acronis is far from the only utility designed to help you back up your system partition. Paragon Hard Disk Manager (PHDM) has many more features, but its interface is made in English, and to use this program confidently, you need to have the appropriate qualifications.
Review the changes proposed by Acronis with the utmost care: in most cases it is impossible to roll them back when the Proceed button has already been pressed.

3 loading carrier users are more likely to use it in critical situations, when a serious failure occurs in the work of Windows, and it stops loading... Using a bootable media with the functionality of the program, the operating system can be restored from a once created backup. However, as part of the bootable media True Image includes not only the system restore function, but also other tools that are presented in the desktop version of the program running inside Windows.

These tools include the function of creating a backup copy.

Why is True Image bootable media useful for backing up Windows and other data stored on your computer? How does this process take place through the bootable media interface? We will deal with these issues in detail below.

Benefits of using bootable media

Working with Acronis True Image functionality on bootable media will be of interest primarily to system managers working with multiple computer devices. By purchasing a program license for only one computer and using it to create bootable media, in the future it will be possible to solve problems with an unlimited number of computers.

And on all these computers, you won't need to fiddle with installing the program on the system.

In the case of low-power computers, the process of creating a backup to bootable media will be faster, since hardware resources will not be used by the operating system and software background processes.

Working with bootable media Is also a solution to the problem of incompatibility between versions of the Acronis True Image desktop program and Windows versions. Not only the latest versions of True Image 2015 and 2016, but also many other programs in their current versions are incompatible with the old Windows XP. However, this system is still used by some, and bootable media could be a temporary solution until such users are ripe to upgrade to Windows 7, 8.1 or 10.

Software tools like Acronis True Image- far from secure software, so that it can be freely accessed from a password-free administrator account. If children, novice users, or a whole group of people in the organization have access to the computer, their unconscious experiments with the functionality of the program can have negative consequences. Whereas bootable media is an alternative to using the program's capabilities, available only to computer experts.

Finally, with regard to the actual process of creating a backup using the bootable media True Image. A non-bootable Windows does not need to be repaired. You can create a backup copy to save the necessary data, and install the operating system itself on a formatted disk partition. For example, we have a situation where the user wants to install a more recent version of Windows. From a previously saved backup of the old (unbootable) Windows can later extract program settings and user files that were stored on the system partition. In a new Windows system, an old Windows backup image can be connected using Acronis True Image to display it as a separate disk partition in the system explorer.

Create bootable media

To create bootable media, we will use a licensed desktop program. On the official site Acronis you can download and use the trial version of the program for free for a whole month. However, the functionality of the bootable media created with the trial version is limited. In particular, this limitation applies to the process of creating backups.

In the True Image window, move to the tab. We need Bootable Media Builder.

- will it be flash drive , CD- , DVD disc or ISO image to store the file on your computer. The latter must be chosen if we are dealing with BIOS UEFI ... Acronis True Image can burn CD-, DVDs and write regular bootable USB sticks. To create a bootable USB drive UEFI you must first create ISO-file, and then write it down using a special program that can write such flash drives (for example, Rufus or WinSetupFromUSB ).

Making a backup

After creating the bootable media, set it to BIOS the first order of loading from it and enter the interface ... The choice of the bit depth of the program in most cases will not be critical.

On the start page, we have a choice of two main functions - backup and recovery. We choose the first one.

The next window is the choice of what we will actually reserve. There are two options - data (that is, separate folders and files) , and disks and sections... In our particular case, a Windows backup will be created, and this, accordingly, is the system partition of the disk. Therefore, we choose the first option.

In the list of available sections, select the system WITH ... If the boot record is displayed as a separate section MBR , choose it too. We press "Further".

In the choice of further action, options for creating a new backup and updating previously created ones, that is, adding to an existing archive, are presented. Let's choose to start, of course, create a new backup, and in the future we can add changes to it.

- This is the place on the computer disk or on a network share where the backup will be stored. We indicate it by clicking the browse button.

The storage location in our case will be a non-system disk partition. Set the name of the backup using the name templates ... We press "OK".

We carefully check everything and we can press the button "Proceed" ... But you can also press the button "Options" and perhaps choose a different backup method.

Descriptions of backup methods are listed under their name and checkbox.

The creation of a backup copy can be scheduled for the night or before leaving the computer for a long time by checking the automatic shutdown option in the operation progress window.