Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
After installing the application there's a critical step you need to take first, before even thinking about backing up.
Once you've installed Acronis True Image Home, the first step may not be what you might expect. Rather than thinking about what to backup, we need to first prepare for a restore.
(Second installment in the "Backing Up" series.)
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The scenario you want to be ready for is when your machine won't boot. Even if you have a backup, it's no good to you if you can't boot your machine and run software that would restore that backup.
Your first step, then, is to use Acronis' built in wizard to create a bootable CD.
(Downloadable mp4 - 5,647,195 bytes)
Transcript
Now that you've installed Acronis, there's actually a very important first step that you need to take before even backing up your machine.
And that is to create a Bootable Rescue Media.
What this wizard does is it creates a bootable CD, or the image of a bootable CD, that you would use in the case where you want to restore from a backup, but your machine won't boot.
In most cases, what you'll do is run through the wizard fairly quickly. The default options are pretty much what you want.
I have it create an ISO image.
And, in this particular case, that's my only option since this machine has no CD burner.
Once you've created the ISO image, you would then burn it to CD using a tool like Image Burn.
In this particular case, it's now asking me where I want to put it and what I want to call it.
I'm giving it a name, Acronis Rescue CD ISO.
These are a summary of the options that I've selected.
It's a fairly quick process to actually create the image.
All it's really done is created a 65 megabyte file.
Once completed, you can then, as I said, use a tool like Image Burn to write that to CD. I'll actually show that as a separate step later.
But, to reiterate, the important take-away here, is before even considering what and how and whether to backup, make sure that you create a bootable rescue media that you would use in the worst case when your machine doesn't boot.
Article C3836 - August 11, 2009
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
(Cont)Restarting Backup/Restore operations
I am at What to back up and by default Neither "Back up sector-by-sector (requires more storage space)" nor "Back up unallocated space"(which is grayed out) are checked.
Posted by: snail at January 12, 2010 6:56 PM(Cont) reattempting Backup/Restore
Posted by: snail at January 12, 2010 6:59 PMsorry, one more detail on this stage
Under the type for the E it says "FAT32(LBA)" and for F it says nothing under space used and "0xEF (EFI)"
for type.
What do these mean? Is the MBR always on the system partition(primary and active)?
I want to Create Bootable Rescue Media CD with the image files to automatically restore (When run from this it automatically restore)
Posted by: walid at September 11, 2010 4:25 PMAcronis TrueImage Home failed to install twice, requiring a System Restore. Running Vista.
Posted by: david at February 6, 2012 5:07 PMLeo I made an Acronis Restore Disk but Boot system is Linux which does not read my drive letters correctly so the image is difficult to restore.
Posted by: Paul Simpson at March 15, 2012 9:52 AMCan you help me with a tutorial how to make a WinPE based Restore Disk which I am told will read my drive letters correctly. Please Help Me!!!