Re: ANY reason not to turn off System Restore for non-boot drives?
- From: a2mgoog@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 12:01:43 -0800 (PST)
Short version: you were right, thank you very much. However, even an
MVP might learn something by reading the long version below.
On Dec 31 2007, 6:56 pm, "Shenan Stanley" <newshel...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
With all respect - you should really read up on how the product you are
utilizing works (and/or upgrade the version you are using from here:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard.)
Well, I did all that a couple of weeks ago, but to no avail. See
below.
The manual clearly states it does exactly as 'all' of us have suggested to
you. ;-)
http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf
Page 12...
Chapter 3. General information
3.1 Disc/partition images
A backup archive (also called in this guide "image backups") is a file or a
group of files that
contains a copy of all information stored on selected discs/partitions.
Backing up discs and partitions is performed in a special way: Seagate
DiscWizard stores a
sector-by-sector snapshot of the disc, which includes the operating system,
registry, drivers,
software applications and data files, as well as system areas hidden from
the user. This
procedure is called "creating a disc image," and the resulting backup
archive is often called a
disc/partition image.
Seagate DiscWizard stores only the portions of your hard disc that contain
data (for
supported file systems). Further, it does not back up swap file information
(pagefile.sys
under Windows NT/2000/XP) and hiberfil.sys (a file that keeps RAM contents
when the
computer goes into hibernation). This reduces image size and speeds up image
creation and
restoration of the data.
Do you really think that's clear? It seemed confusing to me when I
first read it. I would think that you either copy the data (and
hidden and system files are just data with some attribute bits
flipped), or you do a sector by sector backup, but the above seems to
say Disc Wizard does both.
I thought I might clear it up by reading the manual for the full
Acronis backup, which is available on their website. Here's what it
said:
***
"When you back up files and folders, only the data, along with the
folder tree, is compressed and stored. Backing up disks and
partitions is performed in a different way: Acronis True Image Home
stores a sector-by-sector snapshot of the disk, which includes the
operating system, registry, drivers, software applications and data
files, as well as system areas hidden from the user. This procedure is
called "creating a disk image," and the resulting backup archive is
often called a disk/partition image.
"By default, Acronis True Image Home stores only those hard disk parts
that contain data (for supported file systems). Further, it does
not back up swap file information (pagefile.sys under Windows NT/
2000/XP/Vista) and hiberfil.sys (a file that keeps RAM contents when
the computer goes into hibernation). This reduces image size and
speeds up image creation and restoration. However, you might use the
Create an image using the sector-by-sector approach option that lets
you include all of the sectors of a hard disk in an image."
***
IMO this is much clearer than the Disc Wizard manual. It seems to
explicitly say that with the full Acronis product, when imaging a
partition you have a choice between a normal backup that ignores
unused space, or a sector backup that does not. With Disc Wizard, you
have no option, as comparing the two passages shows. It seemed pretty
clear to me that the Disc Wizard manual was created by simply cutting
sentences out of the Acronis manual (this is obvious when you actually
see the manuals, because the graphics and layout are identical), and a
bit of clumsy editing resulted in a misleading paragraph.
I tested my theory by imaging my C drive and looking at the files the
image contained. Sure enough, there was pagefile.sys, when the manual
VERY clearly said that it was not included. The manual was simply
wrong.
All this occurred just last week, with the latest version of Disc
Wizard, so that's why I was sure that the image backup included unused
sectors. However, I didn't want to argue with you when you quoted the
manual unless I was absolutely sure, so last night I did another
experiment. I created an 800MB logical drive, filled it with data,
and imaged it. Then I deleted all the files on it, which due to some
files being too large to put in the Recycle Bin, resulted in about 90%
free space, and I imaged that. Then I emptied the Recycle Bin, and
took a third image. The results confirmed that only the data is
being backed up, and that Acronis considers the Recycle Bin to be
data. The image of the full drive was 216MB (excellent compression
because I used text files as my data), the image of the 90% empty
drive was 22MB, and the image of the empty drive was 360KB.
As a final, super-duper confirmation, I looked at my "empty" disc with
a sector editor, and could read the text files that had been deleted.
I then used a wipe program to overwrite everything with zeroes. I
then restored the backup of the empty image, and looked at the sectors
again. They were still full of zeroes.
So, bottom line: the manual is wrong, but not about unused space being
skipped during an image backup. Thanks to all of you for your
persistence in getting through to me.
.
- References:
- Re: ANY reason not to turn off System Restore for non-boot drives?
- From: a2mgoog
- Re: ANY reason not to turn off System Restore for non-boot drives?
- From: Shenan Stanley
- Re: ANY reason not to turn off System Restore for non-boot drives?
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