Will 32 bit Acronis True Image Backup a Windows 7 C: Drive

I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?

jack3 wrote:
I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?

Structurally, Vista through Windows 10 share the newer BCD boot
management and separate boot stuff. So I tried a search on
"Acronis 8 Vista" and found this. The program wouldn't install,
which suggests the installer didn't auto-elevate to Administrator
for some reason. It's either that, or the path it was installing
to was wrong or something. Acronis also likes to install their
various goofy "services", and those might behave differently
on newer OSes.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acro...8-vista-32-bit

*******

There are a number of backup products available now. Raymondcc
benchmarked them, so at least you can see some names.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-comme...ed-comparison/

Some of those offer free versions.

And the way this works is:

1) Windows 7 has its own "System Image" form of backup
(see the control panels for the backup control panel).
Which does a full backup of C: and System Reserved at a
minimum. It's not a "file-by-file just do my Downloads folder"
thing. It backs up the partitions to protect against
a hard drive failure. Slap in a new drive, restore
the entire two partitions, and your OS is running again.

2) The backup industry is then faced with a problem.
They cannot sell a product which merely duplicates
the built-in Windows 7 feature. And some of them want
to offer Free versions, to grease the wheel and get you
interested.

So what they invent is "full, incremental, differential"
backups. The last two are more space efficient, on
subsequent backups after your first "full". And then these
can become paid features.

Incremental is the most space efficient, and is the last
feature they would ever consider giving away for free.

Windows also has an option to back up your Downloads folder,
but I don't keep track of which version does what. So you'll
have to check. I was actually testing this stuff in
Windows 10 the other day, and I did manage to backup
my Downloads folder. The output from that backup option,
is a bunch of 200MB ZIP files. And my backed up files are inside
those. The tool in that case on Windows 10, also seemed
to be doing an Incremental, but it did it a horrible way - it
stored the difference in System Volume Information. When I
actually needed to do some maintenance on my test setup,
all the newer backups were *lost*. So that particular
feature only works properly, on a "100% healthy never
needs maintenance" Windows setup. Which is never going to
happen. You could burp or fart and lose files you were
depending on in an emergency. I could find a discussion
thread, which said the incremental files were supposed
to be copied from System Volume Information to the
backup drive, but for some reason, the ZIP files associated
with that, disappeared on me.

So where does that leave us ?

You could try Macrium Reflect Free. It will do
partition by partition backups, and provides random
access by allowing mounting of the images later. That's
a decent feature set for free.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

I think Easeus makes a free backup.

https://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html

And Aomei (an occasional USENET spammer) makes a free one.

https://www.backup-utility.com/free-...-software.html

I've only used Macrium and cannot say too much about
the others. With Easeus, watch for adware on their free
versions. They're not really all that "efficient" with their
adware, as I got one download of theirs, it had OpenCandy,
but the manifest didn't fetch anything (no payload). Which
was pretty weird.

What these products should all have in common, is they
should be able to do a "full" for free. And that's what
you need to protect against a HDD failure, an SSD failure,
or ransomware. If you like the product enough, buying a
copy will then give you Incremental, allowing daily backups
with only a small addition to your backup drive for each one.

Paul

"jack3"; wrote in message
...
I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?

I used an older version of ATI for years, right through Win8.1 (it was the
freebie that came with an old Seagate or WD drive I bought back in the WinME
days).
I never installed it, though; I created the bootable CD and did my images
that way. Found it to be quicker with less chance of error. The only down
side is that you can't use your PC while it's backing up and verifying it. I
usually start my back-ups while I'm out shopping or playing tennis or
something that's going to keep me out of the house for a couple of hours.

I use the same method still with ATI2017 on my Win10 machines. I got that
for free from a promotion that Newegg was running- $30 with a $30 MIR.
Couldn't pass up that deal :-)
--

SC Tom

On 12/15/2017 10:39 PM, jack3 wrote:
I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?


Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (x64)
True Image Home 2015 (x32, file version 18.0.0.6613)

I use this regularly every week for manually-launched backups.
Occasionally, I need to restore a backed-up file. Both operations
execute without any problems.

--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

President Trump: Please stop using Twitter. We need
to hear your voice and see you talking. We need to know
when your message is really your own and not your attorney's.

David E. Ross wrote:
On 12/15/2017 10:39 PM, jack3 wrote:
I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?


Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (x64)
True Image Home 2015 (x32, file version 18.0.0.6613)

I use this regularly every week for manually-launched backups.
Occasionally, I need to restore a backed-up file. Both operations
execute without any problems.


ATI 2013 on Win 7 Home run by batch. Used the image last week and worked
fine.

I also bought theNewEgg deal but have not installed it yet.

--
Zaidy036

In message , SC Tom writes:
[]
I used an older version of ATI for years, right through Win8.1 (it was
the freebie that came with an old Seagate or WD drive I bought back in
the WinME days).
I never installed it, though; I created the bootable CD and did my
images that way. Found it to be quicker with less chance of error. The

I do the same with Macrium Free 5. (It fits on a mini-CD, which I find
easier to keep handy with my backup drive.)

only down side is that you can't use your PC while it's backing up and
verifying it. I usually start my back-ups while I'm out shopping or
playing tennis or something that's going to keep me out of the house
for a couple of hours.

Or overnight. (I have only USB2.)

I use the same method still with ATI2017 on my Win10 machines. I got
that for free from a promotion that Newegg was running- $30 with a $30
MIR. Couldn't pass up that deal :-)

$30 seems very cheap for a space station, Russian or otherwise.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Lewis: ... d'you think there's a god?
Morse: ... There are times when I wish to god there was one. (Inspector Morse.)

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , SC Tom writes:
[]
I used an older version of ATI for years, right through Win8.1 (it was
the freebie that came with an old Seagate or WD drive I bought back in
the WinME days).
I never installed it, though; I created the bootable CD and did my
images that way. Found it to be quicker with less chance of error. The

I do the same with Macrium Free 5. (It fits on a mini-CD, which I find
easier to keep handy with my backup drive.)

only down side is that you can't use your PC while it's backing up and
verifying it. I usually start my back-ups while I'm out shopping or
playing tennis or something that's going to keep me out of the house
for a couple of hours.

Or overnight. (I have only USB2.)

Ditto. I use various programs (Symantec Ghost, O&O Disk Image, Reflect,
TrueImage, and W7's) for my updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 OS. I switch each
program monthly. I have not restored any W7 images so far. So knock on
wood.
--
Quote of the Week: "I really believe I've been a good person. Not
perfect - forget about perfect - but just learning by what I was taught
and living by my own values. I might have stepped on a few ants - and a
few other things as well - but I've never hurt anybody." --Kiri Te
Kanawa
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
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On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 14:21:26 -0600, (Ant) wrote:

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , SC Tom writes:
[]
I used an older version of ATI for years, right through Win8.1 (it was
the freebie that came with an old Seagate or WD drive I bought back in
the WinME days).
I never installed it, though; I created the bootable CD and did my
images that way. Found it to be quicker with less chance of error. The

I do the same with Macrium Free 5. (It fits on a mini-CD, which I find
easier to keep handy with my backup drive.)

only down side is that you can't use your PC while it's backing up and
verifying it. I usually start my back-ups while I'm out shopping or
playing tennis or something that's going to keep me out of the house
for a couple of hours.

Or overnight. (I have only USB2.)

Ditto. I use various programs (Symantec Ghost, O&O Disk Image, Reflect,
TrueImage, and W7's) for my updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 OS. I switch each
program monthly. I have not restored any W7 images so far. So knock on
wood.

Belt, suspenders, buttons, zippers, and shoelaces. No Velcro? :-)

--

Char Jackson

On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 00:39:48 -0600,
wrote:

I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?

dang it!

I guess I'm going to have to do some more exploring. Although, I do
see that Win 7 has the ability to backup the entire system, But I
liked Acronis because it did the entire drive with my XP comptuter.

On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 02:34:57 -0500, Paul
wrote:

jack3 wrote:
I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?

Structurally, Vista through Windows 10 share the newer BCD boot
management and separate boot stuff. So I tried a search on
"Acronis 8 Vista" and found this. The program wouldn't install,
which suggests the installer didn't auto-elevate to Administrator
for some reason. It's either that, or the path it was installing
to was wrong or something. Acronis also likes to install their
various goofy "services", and those might behave differently
on newer OSes.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acro...8-vista-32-bit

*******

There are a number of backup products available now. Raymondcc
benchmarked them, so at least you can see some names.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-comme...ed-comparison/

Some of those offer free versions.

And the way this works is:

1) Windows 7 has its own "System Image" form of backup
(see the control panels for the backup control panel).
Which does a full backup of C: and System Reserved at a
minimum. It's not a "file-by-file just do my Downloads folder"
thing. It backs up the partitions to protect against
a hard drive failure. Slap in a new drive, restore
the entire two partitions, and your OS is running again.

2) The backup industry is then faced with a problem.
They cannot sell a product which merely duplicates
the built-in Windows 7 feature. And some of them want
to offer Free versions, to grease the wheel and get you
interested.

So what they invent is "full, incremental, differential"
backups. The last two are more space efficient, on
subsequent backups after your first "full". And then these
can become paid features.

Incremental is the most space efficient, and is the last
feature they would ever consider giving away for free.

Windows also has an option to back up your Downloads folder,
but I don't keep track of which version does what. So you'll
have to check. I was actually testing this stuff in
Windows 10 the other day, and I did manage to backup
my Downloads folder. The output from that backup option,
is a bunch of 200MB ZIP files. And my backed up files are inside
those. The tool in that case on Windows 10, also seemed
to be doing an Incremental, but it did it a horrible way - it
stored the difference in System Volume Information. When I
actually needed to do some maintenance on my test setup,
all the newer backups were *lost*. So that particular
feature only works properly, on a "100% healthy never
needs maintenance" Windows setup. Which is never going to
happen. You could burp or fart and lose files you were
depending on in an emergency. I could find a discussion
thread, which said the incremental files were supposed
to be copied from System Volume Information to the
backup drive, but for some reason, the ZIP files associated
with that, disappeared on me.

So where does that leave us ?

You could try Macrium Reflect Free. It will do
partition by partition backups, and provides random
access by allowing mounting of the images later. That's
a decent feature set for free.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

I think Easeus makes a free backup.

https://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html

And Aomei (an occasional USENET spammer) makes a free one.

https://www.backup-utility.com/free-...-software.html

I've only used Macrium and cannot say too much about
the others. With Easeus, watch for adware on their free
versions. They're not really all that "efficient" with their
adware, as I got one download of theirs, it had OpenCandy,
but the manifest didn't fetch anything (no payload). Which
was pretty weird.

What these products should all have in common, is they
should be able to do a "full" for free. And that's what
you need to protect against a HDD failure, an SSD failure,
or ransomware. If you like the product enough, buying a
copy will then give you Incremental, allowing daily backups
with only a small addition to your backup drive for each one.

Paul

Okay, that's more looking around I have to do. I always backup since
the time I had a drive go on a Friday some years back and decided to
wait until Monday to get a new drive to put my backup on. Guess what?
My backup drive went on Sunday. Lost YEARS of stuff. I now have a
slew of external drives with everything backed up at least thrice.
Live and learn.

Thanks.

(Leaving this unedited for anyone else who needs all the info.)

On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 00:39:48 -0600,
wrote:

I'm using an older Acronis, Ver.8. I don't want to use a newer
version because all I have read about their program in the last number
of years is that it's crap. It's a shame if true. My old version has
saved my butt many, many times.

Has anyone here ever used an older version of TI to back up Win 7?

Ant wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , SC Tom writes:
[]
I used an older version of ATI for years, right through Win8.1 (it was
the freebie that came with an old Seagate or WD drive I bought back in
the WinME days).
I never installed it, though; I created the bootable CD and did my
images that way. Found it to be quicker with less chance of error. The

I do the same with Macrium Free 5. (It fits on a mini-CD, which I find
easier to keep handy with my backup drive.)

only down side is that you can't use your PC while it's backing up and
verifying it. I usually start my back-ups while I'm out shopping or
playing tennis or something that's going to keep me out of the house
for a couple of hours.

Or overnight. (I have only USB2.)

Ditto. I use various programs (Symantec Ghost, O&O Disk Image, Reflect,
TrueImage, and W7's) for my updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 OS. I switch each
program monthly. I have not restored any W7 images so far. So knock on
wood.

But you know the rules of "unexpected consequences", right ?

I've learned over the years, to *always* test the restore.
Why would you do backups, and waste the time setting them up,
unless you know *for sure* they actually work ? There were
a couple hilarious cases at work, that taught me this.

One was our 8mm helical scan tape drive, which chip designers
and hardware guys would cable up to their machines and backup
design files. Well, some of the people didn't know you were supposed
to clean the heads on the tape drive. A large number of tapes...
were blank. So now people had tapes locked in their desk drawer,
and when an emergency arose, they would reach in the drawer for...
an empty tape.

The second case involved an in-house backup/restore program.
The developers celebrated, with high-fives and the like,
that they had "finished" the backup utility. About a month
later, the main server drive goes down. They fire up their
"utility", and... nothing. It won't restore. And people are
sitting on their hands now, because the main server is down.
Nobody can work. Talk about hair loss... Now they have to
debug the code, *and* get all the staff back to work. What
was their excuse later ? "Well, we didn't have any hardware to
test the restore on, so... we didn't test it." And testing
it while everyone is waiting... is so so much better.

*******

To dial-in backup restore programs:

1) You need a backup method you trust. I use "dd" for this.
Before I tried Macrium and did a restore, I backed up the
drive with "dd", because I know it works. It's too low level
*not* to work. It requires enough storage space to hold
that copy, until the test is complete.

2) Once you've done a restore, and it seems to be running well,
you can throw away your .dd copy of the disk drive. Naturally,
you need an environment to run "dd" from, like a LiveCD.

To restore Windows 7 to C: , you need to make the emergency
boot CD, or have a Windows 7 installer DVD handy for the purpose.

Paul

In message , jack3
writes:
[]
Okay, that's more looking around I have to do. I always backup since
the time I had a drive go on a Friday some years back and decided to
wait until Monday to get a new drive to put my backup on. Guess what?
My backup drive went on Sunday. Lost YEARS of stuff. I now have a
slew of external drives with everything backed up at least thrice.
Live and learn.

Wow, talk about unlucky! The chances of that ...? Or was it a very hot
day or something?

I presume you back up by cloning, so when the first drive failed you
replaced it with the clone, which is good - you could carry on. I backup
by imaging, so would be temporarily without the computer if the usual
drive failed. (Not foolproof as I could still lose everything if the
backup drive failed too, but that drive would not be in use.)

Thanks.

(Leaving this unedited for anyone else who needs all the info.)

(Snipped as there are now two copies, the original and yours.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm not against women. Not often enough, anyway." - Groucho Marx

Char Jackson wrote:
On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 14:21:26 -0600, (Ant) wrote:

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , SC Tom writes:
[]
I used an older version of ATI for years, right through Win8.1 (it was
the freebie that came with an old Seagate or WD drive I bought back in
the WinME days).
I never installed it, though; I created the bootable CD and did my
images that way. Found it to be quicker with less chance of error. The

I do the same with Macrium Free 5. (It fits on a mini-CD, which I find
easier to keep handy with my backup drive.)

only down side is that you can't use your PC while it's backing up and
verifying it. I usually start my back-ups while I'm out shopping or
playing tennis or something that's going to keep me out of the house
for a couple of hours.

Or overnight. (I have only USB2.)

Ditto. I use various programs (Symantec Ghost, O&O Disk Image, Reflect,
TrueImage, and W7's) for my updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 OS. I switch each
program monthly. I have not restored any W7 images so far. So knock on
wood.

Belt, suspenders, buttons, zippers, and shoelaces. No Velcro? :-)

LOL.
--
Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas/Season's Greetings!
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
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