Using External Hard Drive for image backup?

Is hooking up an external hard drive to make an image of my hard drive difficult to perform? Is this the best method to backup, to be safe, in case of a crash? Please advise. Thanks for your time.

 

Nope, not hard at all.

Providing that you are able to get your computer to recognize the external drive from the boot method used by the imaging software, yes, that's an excellent way to do backups.

If it's a USB drive, check that it is supported by the BIOS of your MOBO and the imaging software without being booted into Windows.

If it's an IDE, there's no problem.

 

That is what I use to do my drive images. I use true image and it has you make a set of floppy boot disks so you can use your image made on your USB drive.

 

Newer versions of Acronis TrueImage, v.7.0 & 8.0x prompt you to make a boot/recovery CD. This works fine and allows USB/Firewire external drives to be recognised. Once you make that CD, you can even uninstall the programme and still perform most functions (except incremental backups) from the boot CD. Great stuff! The best backup solution I've seen, and I've seen a few.

 

I do incremental backups with the boot CD all the time, but that is to a second internal drive. Is there a difference with the external, and why would incrementals not be allowed with an external drive?

 

As a matter of fact, True Image cannot create any NTFS images (incremental or whole) by the boot disk method, it can only restore them. That will be possible in future editions they have stated. Now that only applies to NTFS partitions and you can very well image FAT partitions from a boot disk.

FYI, Ghost can do boot disk booted imaging of NTFS and FAT systems.

Source

 

That comes as quite a shock to me since I create images of an NTFS drive on another NTFS drive almost daily, and just did an incremental image that same way today.

Imaging and incremental imaging works fine on NTFS drives with the boot disk. Acronis software was able to do this long before Norton began doing it, or Powerquest, either.

 

Perhaps you should tell Acronis your secret. They don't seem to believe that is possible. Did you follow the SOURCE link I posted? The quote is straight from that.

Beyond that, I have tried and failed before in doing that, that's how I knew of the FAQ page.

 

That's really peculiar! That information is obviously quite wrong. I have made images from the boot disk ever since version 6 (I have 8 now). In fact, I uninstalled Acronis from Windows because I only need boot from the disk to make an image of my NTFS system drive into a folder on my second NTFS storage drive.

Never had the slightest problem doing it, either. And the disk contains the USB drivers to make images on external drives, having introduced this long before Norton or Powerquest were incorporating it.

I'll never go back from Acronis. Just restored one of those NTFS images a few days ago and it worked perfectly.

 

Stranger things have happened. You may have gotten something that fell through the cracks, version wise. As I interpret what Acronis says and look at the language they use, it indicates that this is not a LIMITATION but a RESTRICTION and it will be removed from some promised future versions. Could it have been collusion with MS to prevent XP copying? Perhaps they released a few versions without the restriction...possible I suppose.

All I know is, what they say is certainly painfully true for my boot disk booted imaging. It's just not possible and it does exactly what they say it does in their FAQ's.

Perhaps you could ftp link that disk image up and share the good fortune with us unfortunates.

edit: I use Acronis exclusively even though I have Ghost , Drive Image and Instant Recovery - three very good alternatives, but I still prefer Acronis. It allows me to make images with GoBack enabled which is the downfall of the others. It also does a fine job of imaging from within Windows and doesn't have to reboot.

 

That's the only time I've ever seen that mentioned. I just read the ReadMe file on the disk itself, and it just says it supports any file system of any OS (Linux, FreeBSD, and any OS that uses sector-based storage).

I Have 8.0.540, but I did this on earlier versions. If Norton has it, Acronis had it earler and better is my usual mantra.

I thought you were going strictly by the FAQ. Do you mean that you actually have Acronis and that it doesn't work for you?

When you say, "boot disk ", are you referring to the floppy only or the bootable CD? The CD is what I use and the one I have always recommended that others use to make images to NTFS partitions. Never heard a word about it's not having worked.

 

Nope, it does not work for me. I've been there - done that - and failed several times before doing the research and finding those FAQ's. I couldn't believe it but I had to since they put it in writing.

I've tried it both ways. I prefer the CD method for the speed and convenience but keep both the CD and floppies for those occasions when needed.

 

Well, I guess I'm glad I tried it without reading any FAQ's.

This is really strange to me. I just looked through the pdf manual for TI from their site and see nothing in that about any restrictions whatsoever on storage devices for the images.

From that FAQ:
"What storage devices does Acronis True Image support for keeping
backups?
Partition backups can be created on hard disks, and other storage devices
supported by Windows 98/Ме/NT 4/ 2000/XP. "

I wish someone else would chime in here with their experiences.

What happens when you try to choose an NTFS partition for an image storage? Are the partitions seen in the window where you make the choice?

 

It leads me down the garden path right up to the well, then it won't let me drink.

When choosing a NTFS partition, I get all the way to the last step, even get to name my creation - then I press enter and the error says, "File cannot be created because the logical drive is read-only. Please choose another drive." Even that error message is strange since it isn't really correct. It seems to me the programmer could have saved me a lot of grief by being a little more clear as to what was wrong.

I was trying to image the main drive to my backup drive, both being NTFS file system types. When that failed, I tried electing to burn to CD, that also failed with the same error given.

You don't know me but let me say this, I don't give up very easy! I gave it my best shot and it just wouldn't work. Then I found those FAQ's and thought I was pretty dumb for not reading more before hand.

Furthermore, there are no mitigating circumstances. I have no odd configuration or compressed drives. I don't use passwords are any security encryption, not that any of that would matter for bit-copying.

 

OK.

Well, I'm going to look into this one. You should be able to do this---I can.

I was going to upload that image for you, but it's 17+ megs for the CD and I only have 30 megs of storage. Besides, I suspect now that the problem is not NTFS. That "read-only" message looks familiar from somewhere.

The only other thing I can think of is the disk creation process. I always allow it to install all the drivers, even for devices I don't have, in case I need them later. I don't even remember if there was that kind of choice when making the Acronis disks, but I'll keep looking.

I have to wonder also if this could be simply a permissions issue. My drive has full read, write, and execute permissions (not inherited) for me and for the System. Have you allowed access to removable media in Group Policy for "removable media "? I realize it's not removable---grasping at straws now, I guess.

 

I've pretty much come to a dead-end in searching for a solution to this. But, now you have me a bit worried. Something I just took for granted is something I may not be able to reproduce on another machine. I am just glad I can do it now.

For now, I have only 2 ideas concerning this whole thing.

The first is that I did some experimenting with gdisk. I had a partition that could not be unhidden by Partition Magic. So, I used gdisk 1 /-hide /P:1
to unhide the NTFS partition that I now use for backups. That may have done something.

But, and I think this is the more likely case, I also did quite a bit of experimenting with Knoppix. Just to see exactly what kinds of repairs I would be able to effect on the NTFS drives, I tried to access that same partition and save a document. I'm sure that this is where I got the "read-only" message, but it also gave me the option to remove the read-only attribute. That was before I installed Acronis on this system and that may well be the reason I can save to it now.

I'll keep looking. Try Knoppix if you have it. I'd like to solve this problem for you since you didn't just dismiss me as a lying lunatic. And I need to know how to do it for my next installation, too.

PS. In the "Effective Permissions" for that drive, I have full permissions for Admins, System, and myself. Users are give the usual read permissions, but also have "Create folders/Append data" permission. Is that the same in yours?

 

Don't knock yourself out for me, I also have the alternate proggys that do well from their rescue disk booting to imaging NTFS, no probs. I rarely do it anyway, just when imaging a non bootable NTFS drive for data recovery. I just use Ghost when that situation comes up. It only needs one floppy to boot so that's a plus too. I do all the FAT32 drives though using Acronis, it handles those just fine.
Even so, I would love to hear what you learn.

edit. No, I don't have any Lenix based stuff.

 

Well, too late. I'm on a crusade now. For you, me, and other people.

Could you check your Users' permissions for me in case it is just that simple?

 

I'm the top dog, fully permitted and no other users ever touch this box nor have any been created.

 

The more I think about it, the more I believe it will be a function of the security provided by the NTFS file storage system. Even if no password or user restrictions have been created in Windows, the drive is still secured and locked somehow so it cannot be copied by this boot disk method. That might allow a breach of the security and data could be viewed that was not privy to all parties. That makes sense when you consider that it works in FAT32 and not NTFS.