> > partitions.) There is a checkbox for "backup sector by sector" but I > didn't > > check this, because it would backup all the unused space in the disk, > as > > well as the files. Is that what you're talking about? > > Yes that is the option. It knows which blocks are unused and deals with > them.
Ummm... Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, because the way I got it, you're not making any sense. You're saying to do sector-by-sector, but you're also saying Acronis knows which blocks are unused and will skip them. The point of the "sector by sector" option is to tell Acronis, "I don't want you to think about or care about NTFS or anything. Eliminate all your intelligence, and simply copy every byte from the device." This means "I want you to backup unused space," and it means "Even if there's an unknown filesystem in there, which is not NTFS or anything you recognize, back it up anyway, every single byte." Normally a sector-by-sector backup is only done for unknown filesystems, or filesystems which are suspected of corruption, or if you have some reason you think there's valuable information stored in the unused space. For example, if a virus did a quick format on your hard drive ... All the data still exists, but the filesystem is gone so you can't access any of it. So then you would want some utility to scan all the bits, saying "these blocks look like they might be a jpg image ... and these blocks look like they might be a word doc ..." and so on, attempting to reconstruct your deleted files. If you're paranoid, you might do a sector-by-sector backup of the disk before you allow any utility in the world to start reading from it or working on it. > hrm... I guess baring finding a copy utility that understands sparse > files, > you would be left with the restore partition option. > > Have you tried robocopy to copy from the mounted .tib? (I haven't tried > it.) There are plenty of copy utilities that recognize sparse files. You can "cp --sparse=always" or something like that ... and you can "tar cf - somefile | (cd /destination ; tar xf - --sparse)" and various other incantations ... Yes, I tried this. Again, "ask me how I know." :-( At one point, I did in fact restore a 50G file that was supposed to be sparse, just to get one tiny txt file out of it. It only took overnight. However, when you mount a TIB file, it does not become a drive letter. You can't browse there with cygwin, or winzip, or any other application. The TIB mounter is a Windows Explorer extension, so only WE is able to browse through the image to grab things out. WE is the weak point here ... Simply dragging and dropping a file is your only option, and that doesn't do sparse. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
