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Perform a standard restore, selecting both the MBR and the partition. ![]() Make sure you have a TrueCrypt recovery CD and a backup of absolutely everything of any importance from the drive to which you will be restoring (including secondary partitions).Some steps may have been redundant, I wouldn't know. This isn't necessarily a good how-to guide, since I did not experiment with possibly better ways of doing things. I am going to describe what I did and what it led to. No amount of uninstalling and System Restore rollbacks helped, so it was time to risk it and attempt the whole image restore. Incidentally, to give you an idea for why I value this ability, the issue was that after installing a bunch of Atmel developer tools, including several unsigned drivers, I stopped being able to switch Wi-Fi networks easily: the laptop would connect to the first network, but it would never succeed reconnecting to another one. This weekend, I've finally had a go at performing a restore, and it mostly worked. And untested backups are one of those things. ![]() So, for a long time I wasn't really sure whether these images were at all restorable, and if so, how hard this would be. This was certainly desirable, but I expected this to cause at least some difficulties if I were ever to attempt to perform a whole image restore. It works exactly the same as the images I usually take: True Image creates an image file containing all the files, unencrypted, as well as the MBR.Īs a side-effect of encrypting the whole drive, my data partition was also encrypted. So were backups using Acronis off a bootable CD.įortunately, True Image 2012 supports backups from within the encrypted OS, even though the Acronis Knowledge Base seems to suggest otherwise. I found humongous image files completely unacceptable, and so the procedure for safe backups described on TrueCrypt's website was out of the question. #REMOVE TRUECRYPT BOOTLOADER FREE#This poses a problem for backups: the data physically on the disk is incompressible and indistinguishable from random noise, and the backup program can't know which parts are really just free space that doesn't need backing up. ![]() One might argue it's overkill given what I want to protect (logged-in browser sessions, mostly), but it's a bit like WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) in Wi-Fi: the only thing approaching equivalence to being physically behind a brick wall is government-level cryptography. This certainly feels very secure, and I trust that it actually is very secure. In this mode, I must enter my passphrase before boot commences, and absolutely everything on the drive other than the bootloader is encrypted. To protect my laptop in case it's stolen or I lose it, I use TrueCrypt whole disk encryption. But it has yet to fail me in performing its core function, and that is what matters the most when it comes to backups. It has a number of really annoying issues, so keep that in mind. While I have certainly had way more utility out of it than the money I paid for it, I can't really say I love it. #REMOVE TRUECRYPT BOOTLOADER SOFTWARE#The software I use for these backups is Acronis True Image Home. #REMOVE TRUECRYPT BOOTLOADER DRIVERS#This approach has saved me tons of time: whenever an SDK or a set of dodgy drivers from a hobby hardware maker mess things up beyond all repair, I can always perform a perfect roll-back to an earlier state. So, on my desktop I run such whole partition snapshots weekly and store them on the data partition (which is a separate physical drive and thus protects against physical HDD failure), and the laptop is backed up to the desktop's data partition once a month or so. The restores work well too, because all programs which work only when installed correctly get restored along with the OS. The image ends up being reasonably small, since the the hundreds of gigabytes of random stuff reside on a separate partition. ![]() This set-up turned out to be perfect for whole-partition image backups, too. The original logic behind this split was to simplify clean reinstalls of the OS: by wiping “C:”, I end up deleting pretty much only the things that one has to delete to get a clean install, while all the things that don't need to be deleted (including "portable" programs) remain on the data volume, unaffected. Where possible (namely, on desktops), they reside on different physical disks. The data volume contains everything else, and is huge. It tends to have 30-50 GB of files on it. The system volume (C:) contains the operating system, all programs that require installation, and settings. Back-up set-upįor a very long time now, I've been separating my system and data partitions. I wasn't sure whether the restore was going to work, and it wasn't completely smooth, so read on if you're considering a similar set up. I've been using TrueCrypt's whole disk encryption together with Acronis TrueImage Home partition images for quite a while now, and have recently performed a restore. ![]()
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