Acronis True Image 2013 offers mounting for images and exploring for both images and file-level backups.
Exploring images and file-level backups lets you view their contents and copy the selected files to a hard disk. To explore a backup in Windows Explorer, double-click on the corresponding tib file.
When you copy files from a backup being explored, the copied files lose the "Compressed" and "Encrypted" attribute. If you need to keep these attributes, it is recommended to recover the backup.
Mounting images as virtual drives lets you access them as though they were physical drives. Such ability means that:
a new disk with its own letter will appear in the drives list
using Windows Explorer and other file managers, you can view the image contents as if they were located on a physical disk or partition
you will be able to use the virtual disk in the same way as the real one: open, save, copy, move, create, delete files or folders. If necessary, the image can be mounted in read-only mode.
The operations described in this section are supported only for the FAT and NTFS file systems.
Please keep in mind that, though both file backups and disk/partition images have a default ".tib" extension, only images can be mounted. If you want to view file backup contents, use the Explore operation.
How to mount an image
Start the Mount wizard by clicking Mount image on the Tools and utilities tab.
Select the backup for mounting.
If you selected a backup containing incremental images, you can select one of the successive incremental images (also called "backup versions") by its creation date/time. Thus, you can explore the data state at a certain moment.
To mount an incremental image, you must have all previous backup versions and the initial full backup. If any of the successive backups are missing, mounting is not possible.
To mount a differential image, you must have the initial full image as well.
If the backup was password-protected, Acronis True Image 2013 will ask for the password in a dialog box. Neither the partitions layout will be shown, nor will the Next button be enabled until you enter the correct password.
Select a partition to mount as a virtual disk. (Note that you cannot mount an image of the entire disk except in the case when the disk consists of one partition). If the image contains several partitions, by default all of them will be selected for mounting with automatically assigned drive letters. If you would like to assign different drive letters to the partitions to be mounted, click Options.
You can also select a letter to be assigned to the virtual disk from the Mount letter drop-down list. If you do not want to mount a partition, select Do not mount in the list or clear the partition's check box.
If you select the Mount the partitions in the read-write mode box, the program assumes that the mounted image will be modified and creates an incremental backup file to capture the changes. It is strongly recommended that you list the forthcoming changes in the Comments section to this file. For you to be able to make comments, the optional Comments step appears in the wizard.
Having finished the settings, click Proceed to connect the selected partition images as virtual disks.
After the image is connected, the program will run Windows Explorer, showing its contents. Now you can work with files or folders as if they were located on a real disk.
