Recovering Images & Files with Acronis True Image

[480sparky]

Earlier this year, I bought myself a new computer in order to handle my increased interest in digital photography. A couple years ago, I purchased a 1tb external drive for storing my images on, and have since purchased a 2tb external for back-up purposes.

During the build of my new computer, I opted to purchase Acronis True Image back-up software. I set it up to back up my entire internal hard drive automatically every night.

Recently, I started testing a feature of ATI, and I thought I’d share it here.

If you’ve ever edited an image, and accidently saved it so you over-wrote your original file, ATI can help. But first, a disclaimer. ATI can’t recover a file or image that hasn’t been backed up. So if you’re working with images you just loaded onto your hard drive, then this procedure won’t work. But if you’ve edited an image that’s in the ATI back-up file, then it’s possible to recover the original image without having to restore your entire hard drive.

For this demonstration, I will do two things. One is to create a subdirectory in the Pictures directory, and I’ll call it “File Recovery” for the sake of simplicity. Second, I’m going to intentionally over-write an existing image that I know has been backed up onto my external drive.

For this demonstration, I will use the image in the top left, DSC_0180. Originally, my directory looks like this:

I opened the file in MS Paint, and put a nice pretty red X on it, and simply saved it. So now my directory look like this:

Obviously, this is a mistake that I want to reverse, so I can simply rightclick on the image, and choose Acronis Recovery.

In this case, Acronis brings up two choices for me to recover my image, so I’ll choose the older of the two.

I click on ‘Recover’, then I choose the subdirectory I created for this demonstration:

With the subdirectory in place, I simply click “Recover now”.

Acronis will “do it’s thing,” and violá…. My image is restored in the subdirectory!

Now I’m free to replace the original, or move the file wherever I need to!

 

[Garbz]

That's all good and fine, but why pay for a service that Windows has had available since XP in the form of Volume Shadow Copy. It wasn't part of Vista Home edition, but is part of all Windows 7 versions and does exactly what you are doing now except using a lot less windows to get to the previous versions of a file.

 

[480sparky]

I 'pay for the service' of having everything backed up.... not just files. My OS and Apps are backed up as well. Most back-up programs only copy files, but not .exes, .dlls, etc. So while you may have your files backed up, you still need to figure out how to get your software working again, as well as Windows.

 

[Garbz]

Doing single image recovery via versions (which I thought was the topic at hand here) is completely different from a backup solution. It is important to have both. Just pointing out that Volume Shadow Copy can take care of file versioning and backup.

I also have personal thoughts on the negative implications of keeping a system running indefinitely. Personally I only backup data and and my user profile, never the system. It only takes ~2 hours to get a system up and running from scratch if you know what you're doing, and it's the perfect opportunity to rid yourself of the millions of apps that have been installed, uninstalled leaving traces, updated many times, and in general a freshly installed system runs so much nicer.

I used to have a decent backup strategy and my computer survived an upgrade through Vista, Windows 7 beta, Windows 7 RC1, and Windows 7. Naturally by that point it ran like ****.

 

[Katebrown172]

Thanks, this helped me!