Operation Manual

3.6 Acronis Snap Restore

With this feature, you can boot the OS on a crashed computer before the system is

completely restored from an image, and start work seconds after the restoration is launched.

The restoration will continue in the background.

3.6.1 Limitations in using Acronis Snap Restore

1. Acronis Snap Restore is currently available for images located in the Acronis Secure Zone

only.

2. Acronis Snap Restore does not support images of Windows Vista. If any Vista edition is

detected in an image, the Snap Restore option will not appear.

3. Naturally, Acronis Snap Restore cannot be used if the image contains no operating system

(a logical partition or disk image) or when restoring file archives.

3.6.2 How it works

When the restoration procedure is started, Acronis True Image Home:

1. Finds the sectors in the image that contain system files, and restores these sectors first.

Thus, the OS is restored and can be started in a very short time. Having started the OS, the

user sees the folder tree with files, though file contents still are not recovered. Nevertheless,

the user can start working.

2. Writes on the hard disk its own drivers, which intercept system queries to the files. When

the user opens files or launches applications, the drivers receive the system queries and

restore the sectors that are necessary for the current operation.

3. At the same time, Acronis True Image Home proceeds with the complete sector-by-sector

image restoration in the background. However, the system-requested sectors have the

highest priority.

Finally, the image will be fully restored even if the user performs no actions at all. But if you

need to start working as soon as possible after the system failure, you will gain at least

several minutes, considering that restoration of a 10-20GB image (most common image size)

takes about 10 minutes. The larger the image size, the more time you save.

3.6.3 How to use

To be able to use Acronis Snap Restore in case of system crash, prepare as follows:

1. Install Acronis True Image Home.

2. Create Acronis Secure Zone on the hard disk (see

Chap er 9. Managing Acronis Secure

Zone

3. Activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (see

3 4 Acronis Startup Recovery Manager

)

and create bootable media with Acronis True Image Home (see

Chapter 10. Creating

bootable media

4. Back up (image) the system disk to Acronis Secure Zone (see

5.2.1 My Computer

backup

). You can back up other disks/partitions as well, but the system image is mandatory.

When performing Snap Restore, the current Acronis True Image Home version always

restores the entire system disk. Therefore, if your system disk consists of several partitions,

all of them must be included in the image. Any partitions that are missing from the image

will be lost.