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时事通讯

Press Contact:
Vaughn Harring
Acronis, Inc.
+886 2 27643355 Ext. 262
media@acronis.com.cn

Listen to Acronis, Inc.'s December 2nd, 2006 interview using:

		Real Audio
		Windows Media Player

Acronis True Image Home

Restoring Up Your Files With Acronis True Image Home Edition

Alan: Today, on LTC, we are going to be talking about the critical part of backing up, which is the "restore process". You cannot really tell that everything will be working right until you have run through restore. But, it is something that you must do. Our guest, today, is Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis. And welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Stephen.

Stephen: Thanks so much for having me back.

Alan: Stephen, when we back up all of our hard drives, we want to be able to take a look at and make sure that everything really is there. You have the ability to map a disk; just like it is a separate volume and then we can look at what we have backed up.

Stephen: We have a couple of things that we are doing now. Absolutely, you can map an image as a virtual hard disk. Let’s say, your existing computer has drives C D and E the virtual disk image would then map the next letter in the alphabet, or drive F. You cannot only look at all of your data and information on the drive, but it even reads and writes to this virtual drive. So, you can even make changes.

Alan: So, I can take my backup that I have already got and I can go out and actually change the backup? That is something that you really can’t do anywhere.

Stephen: This is something, relatively new for Acronis. Let’s say for example, you made an image, you religiously make the images every Sunday night. And now a virus infects your machine. It has not done anything yet, but you find out on Monday that there is a virus on your machine. What do you do?

You go back to the image that you took on Sunday night and you find out that the virus is there as well, on your image. You can actually mount the image as a virtual disk, run your anti-virus software, get rid of that virus, malware, or spyware, whatever has infected your machine and then save the old image as an incremental backup. So, when you restore that image, it will restore, not only the image, but also the incremental backup that has got the spyware or virus cleaned off.

Alan: Now, I can explore the archives and see exactly what is in them and I can just open up like they are in Windows Explorer.

Stephen: You can take any image you want. You can make that image a virtual disk. You can access any files, you can copy any files, using drag and drop from the image onto your hard disk – and now you can drag any file from your hard disk, into your image.

Say that you made an incremental image an hour ago. And you have just created a new document that is terribly important. You don’t want to run through the entire incremental image again. You just want to drag this file, this folder, onto your existing image. You can do that very simply when you save the image, it will automatically save that update as an incremental backup. So, that the next time you go to restore that image, it will restore, not only that base image, but also anything that you have added to it.

Alan: It works also, if you use your Secure Zone?

Stephen: It works with the Secure Zone; it works if you are saving your image on a remote drive or over the network, to a FTP site. It doesn’t matter where the image is restored. The important thing here is that you can take your image back and you can make changes to an existing image and then restore those changes, along with the image.

Alan: I like the idea that I can go in and I can tag certain files that I want to restore, so I do not have to restore the whole image, just to get one or two files.

Stephen: You can restore individual files, you can restore individual folders; it adds a lot of flexibility. Restoration is everything. We talk a lot about backup. We talk a lot about making sure that you are doing backups all the time, that you have a strategy and all that. But, really, the backup, itself, is not the most important part of the process. The most important part is to restore that image. And if you are a corporate user or a home user, all you care about is to be back up and running if a problem occurs. With our Home Product, it will allow you to restore your image, back to the same hardware. With our corporate products, we have the ability to restore that image, not only for the same hardware, but also to different hardware.

So, let’s say that you have a server that failed. You can restore that image; you can even restore a changed image to an entirely different set of hardware, (different motherboards, different processors, different drives, different network cards) and you can do it all in a matter of minutes — not hours or days.

Alan: If anybody has ever tried to restore a different hardware set-up, XP or 2000 is not forgiving, whatsoever. It finds the first thing that is not right and you get what they call, The Blue Screen of Death. And from there on, nothing seems to work right.

Stephen: Once you hit The Blue Screen of Death, quite frankly, there is very little that you can do with your system. Remember that, even if you buy multiple systems on the same day, from the same company, you still might get different hardware for the different machines. Even if you try to install a downed server to a different model of the same product, it still might not work, because you have a different motherboard in there, you’ve got different drives. There are different identifications on each of these components. And Windows, as you say, is not forgiving. It will think that you are trying to install a pirated copy of the software and it will stop installing.

Alan: Worse than that, you can have a one-off version of your video card and when it tries to boot up, the video card tries to initialize and it says, "Nope, I don’t the right driver", and splat, there it goes!

Stephen: Occasionally, you will have a video card initialized, it will initialize in only sixteen colors. I don’t know about you, but it looks like an Andy Warhol picture to me.

Even if your system does boot, there’s no telling if it decides to boot correctly or that will boot in a way that is actually usable.

Alan: You have the Universal Restore. You take a snapshot, just like you normally do, but now you are only restoring the programs and the data, and you are not really restoring the hardware. How does that work?

Stephen: Universal Restore is a component that actually fits between the hardware and our software.

Let’s assume that you have taken an image on a Dell System. Now you are restoring it to a Hewlett-Packard System. There is a lot of difference in the manufacturing of them. What would happen is when you start to restore your image; Acronis will install just enough of the operating system to reboot Windows. After it reboots and starts to restore the rest of the image, it will act almost as if it were a brand new Windows install. It if identifies a component and there is no driver for it, it will ask you to install the driver from a CD or allow you to point to a folder.

Acronis will identify most of the popular hardware drives in the corporate version of Acronis True Image. So, if you are using Acronis True Image Workstation, Server or Enterprise Server, it will be a directory, already available, with the bulk of the drivers that are used, today. If, for some reason, Windows just can’t identify the correct driver from that repository of drivers that are already existing, it will ask you to install a new driver. For example, it doesn’t recognize your network card. You can install the drivers for your network card while you are restoring the image, just as you would for a brand new install of Microsoft Windows. So, when you are done installing the image, you will have all of your new drivers installed, as well.

Alan: That is a great way to make sure that your computer is always up-to-date. You know, when you restore an image under a new computer, you almost have a pristine computer, don’t you?

Stephen: Essentially, you do. Remember, that your data will far outlast your hardware. The lifetime of most corporate, today, is about eighteen months. So, the computer that you purchased this past summer – chances are, in a corporation, you will be retiring it sometime next year. Your data, however, has a lifetime of its own. It lives forever. So, you really have to accept, even before you install the software, that this hardware is temporary. Virtually, all computer hardware is temporary, in that regard. Your data will long outlast it.

Alan: In making incremental backups, a lot of times, you may be changing hardware inside that period of time that you have actually made the incremental backups. For instance, you could have had a network card fail and you put anew network card in there. You have to basically make sure that when you restore it, it is not going to overwrite the wrong driver version for the network card.

Stephen: That’s correct. One of the recommendations that we do make, however, is that if you are doing hardware changes, we do recommend that you create a new base image. It just makes sense. It makes it a lot easier, so that you do not have potential problems with new cards and new drivers. It also allows you to make sure that whatever new drivers you have just installed are once again, part of your base image. It will speed the process of restoring the image, later on. And it also eliminates as many potential pitfalls as possible, when doing a restoration.

Alan: In the Acronis Recovery System, you actually have a Recovery Manager, so that when we try to boot and we can’t boot – how does that work?

Stephen: The Acronis Recovery Manager works hand in hand with the Acronis Secure Zone. Let’s assume that you have made an image of your hard disk, and storing it in the Acronis Secure Zone. Now when your system won’t boot at all you can get access to this partition. When you boot the system, before Windows actually boots, as in this case, before Windows actually fails, you hit the f11 key. That activates the Acronis Recovery Manager. Acronis Recovery Manager is a special middle application that we put in that allows you to restore an image. It will ask you, "Where you want to restore this image from?" It will restore the image over the network, it will restore it from an external disk drive, or you can restore it from your Acronis Secure Zone. It will be able to identify the partition, take the data from this partition, and restore your C partition, your boot partition.

Alan: What are we looking as far as the price of your new Acronis True Image 10 Home Edition?

Stephen: The Acronis True Image 10 Home Edition, even with all the additional features and functionality maintains the same Manufacturer’s List Price of $49.99 that it has been at for the past four years. If you want the ability (for the new small office, home office) to restore to different hardware, then you would want to look at Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation. Our corporate products are still on the Version 9. The Home Product is on Version 10. And with the Workstation, you would also want to add the Acronis Universal Restore Option, which is another $30.00. So, for $110.00, we provide the Workstation Edition, with Universal Restore and to be able to restore your image on any hardware that runs Windows.

Alan: And where can I find more information about the new Acronis True Image 10 Home Edition?

Stephen: You can visit the Acronis website at www.acronis.com.

Alan: And, Stephen, as always, it is our pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let’s Talk Computers, talking about backups. And we hope to have you on the air again, real soon.

Stephen: Well, thanks so much for having me back. And, I would love to come back, again.