User's Manual

Backup file format
Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition 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 2010 Netbook Edition 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 2010 Netbook Edition 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 2010 Netbook Edition 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 2010 Netbook Edition
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 2010 Netbook Edition 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. 146).
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 2010 Netbook Edition 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 about them (at least while the backup disk has enough free space or until the
need for recovery arises).
The terms related to these concepts will be repeatedly used in the Acronis True Image Home 2010
Netbook Edition documentation, so understanding the above concepts may be helpful when using
the program's features.