Test the Recovery Manager and Bootable Rescue Media.

Enable the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.

Validate the Disk Image Archive and Media.

With that said, here's a summary of the steps you will need to take to test a disk image restore using Acronis True Image: Now you can rest assured that the next time you make a restore (for real), it will work. Once you have tested the restore procedure and everything is as it should be, then you can swap everything back. To replicate the restore environment as close to the original as possible, you will need to replace the original drive with a secondary drive, which also means you will need to open up your PC or laptop to make the switch. The second reason is that even if you do successfully restore a disk image to an external USB hard drive, Windows most likely won't be able to boot from the USB drive because Windows is not meant to boot from USB. There are many reasons for this one reason is that Acronis may not recognize your external USB hard drive as the destination disk, so the restore will fail from the get-go. When it comes to restoring a disk image (especially for testing purposes), you should always replicate the restore environment as closely as possible for both source and destination disks.įor example, do not use your external USB hard drive as your destination disk as a way to 'mimic' writing to the C drive. I also suggest you do not keep the original drive attached to the system to avoid overwriting it by accident. In this case, the secondary drive will need to be at least the same size or larger than the original. If there are any complications, the original drive will remain unaffected. Initially, I suggest you test your first disk image restore using a second hard drive, if you have one available. If you do not test the disk image restore process in this manner, there is no way to know that the restore will work.

The simple answer is that you need to run through the entire process of a restore in order to ensure that everything will work as it should, if and when the time comes. You are not the only person to ask me how to restore a disk image backup - and it's an excellent question to ask. My question is: how can I be sure the disk image backups are not corrupt and will properly restore, if and when I need to do a restore? What is the best way to do a test restore of a disk image backup? '

I took your advice and purchased Acronis True Image to backup my computer's hard drive (using disk image backups).

Acronis backup and recovery