User`s guide

3 General information and proprietary Acronis

technologies

3.1 Disk/partition images

A backup archive is a file or a group of files (also called "backups" in this guide), that contains a copy

of all information stored on selected disks/partitions.

Backing up disks and partitions is performed in the following way: Acronis True Image OEM Quick

Backup stores a sector-by-sector snapshot of the disk, which includes the operating system, registry,

drivers, software applications and data files, as well as system areas hidden from the user. This

procedure is called "creating a disk image," and the resulting backup archive is often called a

disk/partition image.

By default, Acronis True Image OEM Quick Backup stores only those hard disk parts that contain data (for

supported file systems). Furthermore, it does not back up swap file information (pagefile.sys under Windows XP

and later) and hiberfil.sys (a file that keeps RAM contents when the computer goes into hibernation). This

reduces image size and speeds up image creation and recovery. However, you might use the Create an image

using the sector-by-sector approach option that lets you include all of the sectors of a hard disk in an image.

A partition image includes all files and folders. This includes all attributes (including hidden and system files),

boot record, and FAT (file allocation table); as well as files in the root directory and the zero track of the hard

disk with the master boot record (MBR).

A disk image includes images of all disk partitions as well as the zero track with the master boot record (MBR).

By default, files in all Acronis True Image OEM Quick Backup archives have a ".tib" extension. Do not

change this file extension.

It is important to note that you can recover files and folders from disk/partition images. To do so,

mount the image as a virtual disk (see Exploring archives and mounting images) or start the image

recovery and select Recover chosen files and folders.

3.2 Full and incremental backups

Acronis True Image OEM Quick Backup can create full and incremental backups.

A full backup contains all data at the moment of backup creation. It forms a base for further

incremental backup or is used as a standalone archive. A full backup has the shortest recovery time

compared to incremental one.

An incremental backup file only contains data changed since the last backup of any type (full or

incremental). Therefore, it is smaller and takes less time to create, but as it doesn't contain all the

data; all the previous backups and the initial full backup are required for recovery.

A standalone full backup might be an optimal solution if you often roll back the system to its initial

state or if you do not like to manage multiple files.

Incremental backups are most useful when you need frequent backups and the ability to roll back to

a specific point in time. Having created a full backup once, if you then create an incremental backup

each day of a month, you will get the same result as if you created full backups every day.

Incremental images are considerably smaller than full images.