How to restore individual files from backup software that uses disk images

Although we generally think of full-image backup software (also known as disk-image backup software) in terms of restoring an entire partition or disk, many restoration jobs don't involve entire disks or partitions. Instead, users need to recover a single file or folder that has been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

With Acronis True Image 2020, you can easily find and restore individual files or folders from a local backup on an external USB drive using the virtual disk feature. In addition, you can easily find and restore files or folders from the secure Acronis Cloud backup. Here is how you can easily find and restore individual files or folders from either a physical drive or the cloud when exploring a virtual disk.

Open a virtual disk by choosing the Explore Image command in the tools menu and select the disk image you want to use. The image is presented as a virtual drive, complete with its own drive letter. As far as your computer is concerned, this disk image is a disk drive. In Acronis True Image, you can do almost anything with this "virtual disk drive" except add or change files on the disk.

Acronis True Image has several additional features not usually found in other disk-imaging backup software. For example, it can create complete images and incremental images and builds the virtual disk using incremental backups. With incremental backups, you avoid disk images that can contain corrupted file versions.

Select the date and time of the virtual image you want to use.

Bear in mind the virtual disk is read-only, so you cannot accidentally overwrite or delete any files. You can read and copy from the disk image, but the hard drive image software doesn't allow you to change or delete the contents of the virtual disk.

To restore files and folders, simply copy them from the virtual disk to the target disk. Can’t find a file or folder? Acronis True Image offers a robust search capability so you can quickly locate files and folders in the full-image backup.

If your backup destination is the secure Acronis Cloud, you use any web browser to explore and navigate through the files in the backup. You can then download any file available in the backup to another location.

In addition, you can use Acronis’ robust search capability to search for a specific file contained in the cloud backup.