Worried about trying to use a backup.

Mike, if you have your weekly full backups and daily incremental backups, then you should be able to recover your computer back to any selected day from within your backup version chain.

If you have never used the recovery function of ATI, then this can seem to be daunting at first but there are lots of helpful documents and videos available that show the process.

My personal recommendation to you would be to invest in buying a spare disk drive for your computer of the same type and similar size to your current internal disk drive.

You could then swap out the current working disk drive and replace it by a new spare drive, then test your recovery to the spare drive, including that all boots into Windows Ok, with the knowledge that you have the original working drive available if anything goes wrong.

To do this type of recovery, you need to create and use the Acronis Rescue Media to boot your computer.  This can be on a small (2GB to 32GB) USB stick or else on a DVD.

See the following reference documents.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media - for details of the 3 different types of rescue media.  Default Simple mode uses Windows Recovery Environment, then Advanced mode offers the older Linux media or Windows PE (using the Windows ADK).

KB 61621: Acronis True Image 2019: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.

Thanks for the help Steve, I'll read through the links and come back with any new questions if that's OK.

You're right about the recovery function being a bit daunting. In my case, frightened to death almost. I like the suggestion of a spare disk.

Spare disk is the way to go! Pull out the original and set it aside so it is untouched and safely away. Practice recovery to get used to it and since doing it on a different disk, no risk to the original.

When you're done, whether your practice results were food or bad, remove the spare disk and put the original back in like nothing ever happened.

No sense in taking backups if you can't ever use them to recover from. And if you never recover to practice or test them, you never really know if they're really good or not. Better to test before a major event than during one.

Thanks for the help and the reply Bobbo, both yourself and Steve make perfect sense.

The spare disk idea seems the perfect way to go. If I had a new drive installed and the Acronis restore worked, would I be able to carry on using the new drive and just keep the old drive as a spare?

The spare disk idea seems the perfect way to go. If I had a new drive installed and the Acronis restore worked, would I be able to carry on using the new drive and just keep the old drive as a spare?

Yes.

Thank you Steve.

Just waiting for the local Pc company to get back to me with SSD prices. I believe they have dropped quite a bit since I bought the one in my PC.

As an update, my local PC company did the Acronis restore for me on a new SSD drive and as far as I can tell, everything was successful. THANK YOU ACRONIS.

I'm now worried that the same Blue Screen or similar error may occur again so I'd like if possible to be able to do the Acronis restore myself. Is it possible that someone could take me through what I should be doing from having the USB stick with boot details on it in my hand? In as basic terms as possible please.

Thanks again for all the help with the recent problems, it has been really appreciated.

Mike, my earlier post here in this topic has all the information that should be needed, including a tutorial document with screen images.

The key points are to boot your computer from the Acronis Rescue Media using the same BIOS mode as used by your Windows OS.

Then to recover to your spare disk drive (with the working drive removed and stored safely) doing a disk mode recovery (as shown in the tutorial document).

Thanks for all the help Steve.

It's mainly the bit "using the same BIOS mode as used by your Windows OS" that I'm totally unsure of. How do I find out which BIOS mode I need please?

Never having been into the BIOS I'm not ever sure how to get there.

Following your links Steve I found out that my system has UEFI mode.

Mike, now you know your OS uses UEFI, then you need to ensure that you boot the Acronis Rescue Media by taking the UEFI option as per the examples shown in KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

One tip, plug in your USB stick, then (when ready to have a try) press & hold a Shift key then click on the option to Restart your computer.  This will bring you to the Windows Recovery menu options panel where you should be able to select to boot from the USB rescue media.

Brilliant. Thank you Steve for all the help. If and when my system gets another problem, I now feel a bit more able to carry out the restore myself.

Hopefully I will never need to use the information you've kindly helped with but I wouldn't count on it.

On a slightly different topic, as I was checking to see if everything worked after the restore, I got a pop up in Acronis 2018 telling me an update is available. Can you advise if this is something I need to do and will I need to make another USB boot stick after updating?

Mike, in the ATI 2018 GUI, open the Account page and check what build number is shown?

The final build for that version is #15470, so if you have a lower number you should install the new update.

Your USB boot media should still be fine but it wouldn't cause any problems if you wanted to update it.

Thank you Steve. Just checked and the build on my 2018 is 12510 so it definitely needs updating.

Mike, build 12510 is only one behind the final build released.

Updated to 15470 now. Thanks for the help Steve.

Getting a little confused.

I watched an Acronis video on YouTube and I thought I needed to get into my PCs BIOS before I could restore a back up. As the operating side of a PC is completely alien to me, I asked on another forum about getting into BIOS.

One of the replies asked why did I need to get into the BIOS as all I needed to do for an Acronis restore was insert bootable media into my PC. In my case a USB stick.

Mike, on many systems it is no necessary to go into the computer BIOS or make any changes there, as it is normally possible to bring up a Boot override menu at boot time by pressing a key.

For Dell computers this is normally the F12 key, for HP it is the Esc key etc.

You can also try pressing the Shift key in Windows 10 when clicking on the Restart option which can also bring up options to allow you to boot from a temporary USB device (the device needs to be already connected).

One other option would be to speak with local PC store that restored your Acronis backup to the new SSD drive, to see if they did this directly on your computer, or whether they connected the SSD to one of their computer systems?  If they did it on your computer, ask them to show you what method they used to boot from a USB stick?

Thanks Steve, when I boot up my PC I can see "Hit DEL to enter BIOS" and "Hit F11 to enter Boot Mode" at the bottom of my screen.

I'm not sure if my local PC company woulds be willing to pass on the information about how they did it as they'll lose time and money. I'll certainly give it a try though, thanks for the suggestion.

Mike, sounds like the F11 key would bring up a Boot menu panel and allow you to select your Acronis Rescue USB stick - can't do any harm to give it a try to see what is shown? 

What actual make of computer do you have?

My PC was built by the local company especially for my photography. They helped and advised me on the spec, and apart from knowing it has an SSD drive for the main C:/ and a couple of internal HDD drives where I back up my photos, I'm afraid I can't be of much help to you.

I also back up my photos to two external drives.

Steve, to add to the above post, I hit the F11 key and got the following in a small window:

Please select boot device
Windows Boot Manager
Sata2
Sata1
Sata4
UEFI Built-in EFI Shell
Seagate BUP Slim BK 0108
Enter Setup

The Seagate BUP is the external drive that does the backups from Acronis.

Mike, the easiest way to get more information on your PC is to use a free audit tool such as Belarc Advisor that will tell you what make of motherboard and associated BIOS is in your PC.

Mike, unless your Seagate BUP Slim BK 0108 is also a bootable drive with the Acronis Rescue Media (introduced with ATI 2019 with the Acronis Survival Kit feature), then you would need to have created an Acronis Rescue Media USB stick on your PC then connect that stick to have it show in the F11 boot menu options.

See the following reference documents. (copied from my earlier post in this topic).

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

I would recommend creating the Windows PE version of the Acronis Rescue Media as described in the KB documents below. 

KB 60820: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create bootable media
KB 60091: Acronis True Image 2018: how Simple bootable media creation mode works

Thanks Steve, I'll download that.

Back to the F11 key and boot manager, if I inserted the USB stick with the Acronis Boot Media on it, would that also show up in the list I added above?

At last I'm starting to feel I'm getting a bit closer, thanks to your help.

We must have both been typing at the same time, this was a reply to your earlier post.

Back to the F11 key and boot manager, if I inserted the USB stick with the Acronis Boot Media on it, would that also show up in the list I added above?

Yes, it should do so.

Thanks for all the help Steve your patience has been brilliant.

Before I let you have a rest, can I ask that if you use the latest incremental backup as a restore, does that somehow link back to the last Full restore and, as the recent restore went so well, and with Acronis bringing out annual upgrades, am I still OK with 2018 or would I get something extra if I upgraded to a later version?

Mike, when restoring, it would be normal to select the latest incremental backup and then let ATI walk backwards through the backup chain to pick up all other files in that chain.

If ATI 2018 is still doing all that you need then there is no real reason to upgrade.  ATI 2019 does almost the same as 2018 with the exception of introducing the Acronis Survival Kit feature, and ATI 2020 needs a few months longer to reach a more mature / stable state due to some early code issues that have emerged since it was released.

Thank you Steve. I have really appreciated all the help and advice.