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Volume (partition) alignment
Acronis Backup automatically eliminates volume misalignment – a situation, when volume clusters
are not aligned with disk sectors. The misalignment occurs when recovering volumes created with
the Cylinder/Head/Sector (CHS) addressing scheme to a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive
(SSD) drive that has a 4-KB sector size. The CHS addressing scheme is used, for example, in all
Windows operating systems earlier than Windows Vista.
If volumes are misaligned, the cluster overlaps more physical sectors than it would have occupied if
aligned. As a result, more physical sectors need to be erased and rewritten each time the data
changes. The redundant read/write operations noticeably slow down the disk speed and overall
system performance. SSD drive misalignment decreases not only system performance, but drive
lifetime. Since SSD memory cells are designed for a certain amount of read/write operations,
redundant read/write operations lead to early degradation of the SSD drive.
When recovering dynamic volumes and logical volumes created in Linux with Logical Volume
Manager (LVM), the appropriate alignment is set up automatically.
When recovering basic MBR and GPT volumes, you can select the alignment method manually if the
automatic alignment does not satisfy you for some reason. The following options are available:
Select automatically - (Default) recommended. The software will automatically set the
appropriate alignment based on the source and target disk/volume properties.
Use the following options only if you absolutely need to.
CHS (63 sectors) - select this option if the recovered volume will be used under Microsoft
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (or earlier) on disks having 512 bytes per physical
sector.
VMware VMFS (64 KB) - select this option when recovering the volume as a VMware Virtual
Machine File System partition.
Vista alignment (1 MB) - select this option if the recovered volume will be used under
Windows operating systems starting with Windows Vista, or when recovering volumes to an
HDD or SSD drive that has a 4-KB sector size.
Custom - Specify the volume alignment manually. It is recommended that the value be a
multiple of the physical sector size.
Logical drive letter (for Windows only)
By default, the first unused letter will be assigned to the volume. To assign other letter, select the
desired letter from a drop-down list.
If you select the empty value, no letter will be assigned to the recovered volume, hiding it from the
OS. You should not assign letters to volumes that are inaccessible to Windows, such as to those other
than FAT and NTFS.
5.1.4.3 Selecting target location for files and folders
Where to recover
Destination
Select a location to recover the backed-up files to:
Original location
