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imaging process is under way and you will not notice anything unusual in the operating system
functionality.
In its turn, the Acronis driver continues working to keep the point-in-time view of the partition.
Whenever the driver sees a write operation directed at the partition, it checks whether these sectors
are already backed up and if they are not, the driver saves the data on the sectors to be overwritten
to a special buffer, then allows overwriting. The program backs up the sectors from the buffer, so that
all the partition sectors of the point-in-time when the snapshot was taken will be backed up intact
and an exact "image" of the partition will be created.
Backup file format
Acronis True Image Home saves backup data in the proprietary tib format using compression. This
provides for reducing the storage space requirements, as well as for backward compatibility with the
previous Acronis True Image Home version. While creating a tib file, the program calculates checksum
values for data blocks and adds these values to the data being backed up. These checksum values
allow verifying the backup data integrity. However, using the proprietary format means that the data
from such backups can be recovered only with the help of Acronis True Image Home itself – either in
Windows or in the recovery environment.
Backup archive validation
How can you be sure that you'll be able to recover your system if the need arises? The feature called
backup validation provides a high degree of such assurance. As was already said, the program adds
checksum values to the data blocks being backed up. During backup validation Acronis True Image
Home opens the backup file, re-calculates the checksum values and compares those values with the
stored ones. If all compared values match, the backup file is not corrupted and there is a high
probability that the backup can be successfully used for data recovery. It is highly recommended to
validate system partition backups after booting from the rescue media. For users of Windows 7
Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate Acronis True Image Home provides a unique way of ensuring that
you will be able to boot from the recovered system partition. The program allows booting from a tib
file containing the system partition image, though it first converts the tib file into a VHD used for
actual booting. So if you can boot from the converted vhd file, you will be able to boot after
recovering this backup to your disk.
Disaster recovery
Recovering from a disaster usually requires a rescue media, because such disaster often means that
your operating system does not boot either due to system data corruption (e.g. caused by a virus or
malware) or a hard disk failure. When the operating system fails to boot, you need some other means
of booting and using Acronis True Image Home to recover the system partition. So to be better
prepared for a disaster, you absolutely must have a rescue media. Owners of the boxed product
already have a bootable rescue CD. Other legal owners of the program can create a rescue media
using the tool called Media Builder.
To enable booting to the recovery environment, it is necessary to ensure that the BIOS boot sequence
includes the rescue media. See Arranging boot sequence in BIOS (p. 189).
Scheduling
For your backups to be really helpful, they must be as "up-to-date" as possible. This means that you
should run backup tasks on a regular basis, say once a day. Though creating a backup task in Acronis
True Image Home is quite easy, it would be very tedious remembering to do the same thing every
day. Well, with the scheduler you do not have to remember. You can schedule backups and forget
