Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010 27
4 Preparing for disaster recovery
4.1 How to best prepare for a disaster
Let us remind you of Murphy's Law: "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong" (and at the worst
possible time, in the worst possible way). And some people say that Murphy was an incurable
optimist. So be warned – your computer may crash and will eventually crash (and maybe just at the
worst possible moment). We may interpret Murphy's Law the other way around – it is vitally
important to consider all the possible things that can go wrong and act so as to prevent them. The
best way to counteract a possible disaster is by taking the necessary precautionary measures:
1) To be better prepared for a disaster, you need to make a full backup of your system disk (or at the
very least the partition containing Windows and your applications). To make this task easier, Acronis
has provided the One-Click Backup feature that allows you to back up the system partition and MBR
during the first start of the newly installed program. If you decide not to use the One-Click Backup,
e.g. because the external hard drive you plan to use for your backups has not been attached at that
time or because you plan to back up more than just the system partition, please, make such a backup
as soon as possible.
2) Whenever possible, you should store your system drive image on a hard drive other than your
primary hard disk C:, preferably on an external one. This gives an additional guarantee that you will
be able to recover your system if your primary hard disk drive fails. Furthermore, it is usually better to
keep your personal data separate from your operating system and applications, for example, on disk
D:. Such an arrangement speeds up the creation of your system and data disks (or partitions) images
and reduces the amount of information you will need to recover. This makes the backup file of your
system disk much smaller and recovery can be easier. In its turn, the smaller the backup file size, the
less chance of its corruption and the less time required for your system recovery.
3) If you store your data (documents, videos, photos, etc.) on a non-system disk, e.g. using the
arrangement described in item 2), it needs to be backed up too. You can either back up the folders
containing your data or create a data disk image. Remember that the imaging procedure is much
faster than copying files and could speed up the backup process significantly when it comes to
backing up large volumes of data. Incidentally, if the image file becomes corrupted for some reason,
it is sometimes possible to mount the image and save most files and folders by copying them from
the mounted image using Windows Explorer.
4) As recovery of your system from a disaster in most cases will be done after booting from the
rescue media, you must test the rescue media as described in the next section - Testing bootable
rescue media (p. 28).
4.1.1 Recommendations for testing that your backups can be used
for recovery
1) Even if you start recovery of the active partition in Windows, the program will reboot into the Linux
environment after the recovery process starts because Windows cannot be left running while the
recovery of its own partition is being carried out. So you will recover your active partition under the
recovery environment in all cases. If you have a spare hard drive, we strongly recommend you to try a
test recovery to this hard drive booting from the rescue media which uses Linux. If you do not have a
spare drive, please, at least validate the image in the recovery environment. A backup that can be
read during validation in Windows, may not always be readable under Linux environment.
