Basic concepts

This section provides general information about basic concepts which could be useful for understanding how the program works.

Backup and recovery

Backup refers to the making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to recover the original after a data loss event.

Backups are useful primarily for two purposes:

• To recover an operating system when it is corrupted or cannot start (called disaster recovery). Refer to Protecting your system for more details about protecting your computer from a disaster.
• To recover specific files and folders after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

Acronis True Image 2015 does both by creating disk (or partition) images and file-level backups respectively.

Backup versions

Backup versions are the file or files created during each backup operation. The number of versions created is equal to the number of times the backup is executed. So, a version represents a point in time to which the system or data can be restored.

Backup versions represent full, incremental and differential backups - see Full, incremental and differential backups.

The backup versions are similar to file versions. The file versions concept is familiar to those who use a Windows Vista and Windows 7 feature called "Previous versions of files". This feature allows you to restore a file as it existed on a particular date and time. A backup version allows you to recover your data in a similar way.

Disk cloning

This operation copies the entire contents of one disk drive to another disk drive. This may be necessary, for example, when you want to clone your operating system, applications, and data to a new larger capacity disk. You can do it two ways:

• Use the Clone disk utility.
• Back up your old disk drive, and then recover it to the new one.

Backup file format

Acronis True Image usually saves backup data in the proprietary tib format using compression. The data from .tib file backups can be recovered only through Acronis True Image, in Windows or in the recovery environment.

Acronis Nonstop Backup uses a special hidden storage for data and metadata. The backed up data is compressed and split into files of about 1 GB. These files also have a proprietary format and the data they contain can be recovered only with the help of Acronis True Image.

Backup validation

The backup validation feature allows you to confirm that your data can be recovered. The program adds checksum values to the data blocks being backed up. During backup validation, Acronis True Image opens the backup file, recalculates the checksum values and compares those values with the stored ones. If all compared values match, the backup file is not corrupted. Refer to Validating backups for details.

Scheduling

For your backups to be really helpful, they must be as "up-to-date" as possible. Schedule your backups to run automatically and on a regular basis. Refer to Scheduling for details.

Deleting backups

When you want to delete backups and backup versions you no longer need, please do it by using the tools provided by Acronis True Image 2015. We recommend that you configure automatic cleanup rules when customizing the backup scheme.

Acronis True Image 2015 stores information on the backups in a metadata information database. Therefore, deleting unneeded backup files in Windows Explorer will not delete information about these backups from the database. This will result in errors when the program tries to perform operations on the backups that no longer exist.

Refer to Deleting backups and backup versions for details.