Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! Guide to Staying Safe on the Internet — FREE Edition as my thank you for subscribing!

Restoring A File Using Acronis TrueImage Home

After scheduling our backups to happen every night,
it’s time to see what they’re good for. We’re going to delete a file, and then restore it from a backup.

In fact, we’re going to restore it from a backup of a couple of days earlier, so that not only will we restore it, but we’ll
restore it to an earlier point in time.

]]>

(Downloadable mp4 – 16,471,365 bytes)
(Downloadable wmv – 3,675,645 bytes)

Transcript

This is Leo Notenboom for askleo.net.

So far we’ve successfully installed Acronis TrueImage Home, created a bootable rescue media, performed a full backup, and scheduled incremental backups.

Now, we’re actually going to restore a file from one of our backups.

You’ll note I’ve got this little text file here on my desktop. It has some lines that I’ve been adding to it everyday for a few days. We’re going to delete that file.

And, in fact, even kick it out of the recycle bin.

So now the only way I’m going to be able to get that file back is from a backup.

In Acronis, we now go over to the manage and restore option.

Here you’ll see a list of the backups that have been taken recently.

I’m going to just arbitrarily choose one of the backups, say, September the second.

And what this does is actually opens a window in windows explorer on what your C drive, or what in this case, my C drive looked like on September the second at 1:00 in the morning.

What I’ll do is I will go to my desktop which is in the user’s username desktop folder.

There’s demotext.text. I will copy it and, instead of putting it back directly onto my desktop, I’m just going to go ahead and put it into the my documents folder.

Now if I take a look at it, I can see that that is in fact exactly what it was on September the second at 1:00 in the morning.

The ability to walk through an image of your machine as it was as of a particular day or time is actually a pretty powerful thing and one of the reasons that incremental backups are so incredibly powerful.

Next step, of course, is what if your machine fails entirely and you need to restore the entire system image.

That will be our next video.

Do this

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

I'll see you there!

9 comments on “Restoring A File Using Acronis TrueImage Home”

  1. Er, umm…are you telling me that Acronis TrueImage Home doesn’t have a compare feature? IMHO, that kinda shoots the purpose of making a backup, if you can’t even verify that the backup is good.

    I never said that.

    Leo
    06-Sep-2009

    Reply
  2. Hi Leo
    I think these video files on Acronis are most useful to me. Thanks. However, the earlier videos in this series were only in MP4 files. Will you be redoing them in WMV format? Unless, ofcourse, you can recommend a good free converter program or a free MP4 viewer.

    Perhaps other aficianodos of your site have had the same problem.

    Tony B

    I do plan to provide WMV versions for all as time permits.

    Leo
    07-Sep-2009
    Reply
  3. To restore a File, what would change, in your instructions, if you are using the ATI disk to boot your computer and the ATI program is not installed on your Computer? Also, the backup image is located on an external Hard drive?

    In the example video, the backup files are located on an external hard drive.

    When booting from the Acronis Recovery Disk, the interface is much the same, and the steps are very, very similar. We’ll see that interface in an upcoming video when we restore an entire computer.

    Leo
    10-Sep-2009

    Reply
  4. This is a very good “How Too” on backups. Can you also proved an extension of how this would be used for backing up and/or restoring Outlook emails?
    Thanks – Jim

    By backing up everything you are backing up your emails, regardless of email program. Outlook stores its emails in a “.pst” file, so restoring would be restoring that file from a backup and opening it up in Outlook.

    Leo
    09-Sep-2009

    Reply
  5. First, a grateful thanks from those in the older groups of members in the Computer Club of Oklahoma City for the work you have done re: Acronis. You sure are helping us!

    Questions that come to mind from us:
    1. Just how does this program work? According to the instructions, the new incremental backup can be attached to any previous incremental backup within the same full backup group. How does the program do that and still save a new incremental backup? When restoring everything (not just a few files, etc), the program has to use the latest full backup and which incremental, or does it use all of them?
    2. Are you going to address Mounting/Unmounting an Image, etc.?
    3. One post asks about backing up Outlook. Does your answer also apply to Outlook Express, and where are emails stored in OE?

    When restoring the program uses the full backup and all incrementals to the date from which you are attempting to restore. That collection allows it to re-create a view on what the entire disk, and the files you care about, looked like at that time.

    In reality, we did mount the backup in this very video. While we chose to only restore one example file, the enture backup was available in Windows Explorer – you could navigate the entire image of what the disk looked like on that specific backup date.

    As for Outlook Express – remember, the backup is simply backing up files, without regard to what they are. Your Outlook Express mail is stored in a collection of files that are backed up, and thus can be restored.

    Leo
    12-Sep-2009

    Reply
  6. Leo, I use MSN mail. Does Acronis Back that up as well? Thank you.

    Acronis backs up what’s on your computer. Information stored out on the web (like most web-based email services) is by definition NOT stored on your computer, and hence not backed up.

    Leo
    23-Sep-2009

    Reply
  7. To Jim,

    Here is step-by-step instructions on how to create e-mail backup using Acronis True Image:

    – Launch Acronis True Image Home;
    – Click Backup and Restore -> Next -> My E-mail -> Choose either Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express (e-mail client you are using);
    – On Backup Archive Location window unfold My Computer folder and choose an existing backup file to backup only changes that took place since the backup creation or enter file name for a new full backup (e.g. MyBackup.tib);
    – Next Windows will show you three choices: 1) Create a new full backup, 2) Create an incremental backup, 3) Create a differential backup. Choose Create a new full backup -> Next -> Use default options -> Next -> Click proceed button.

    regards,
    Mark
    http://www.allacronis.com

    Reply
  8. I just installed the 30 day trial of TrueImage 2013. I made a backup of my partitions onto an external HD. Fine. Now I want to restore ONE file. I see no way of doing that. The tutorial is three years old and screens have changed. Please help me.
    Louis Schmittrotoh

    Reply

Leave a reply:

Before commenting please:

  • Read the article.
  • Comment on the article.
  • No personal information.
  • No spam.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication.

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read.