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I have used Acronis TrueImage whole-disk backups for a long time, and they've saved me on numerous occasions. The ease of restoring a system when you have a 3 day old full image of C:\ is just astonishing.

Recently I started using TrueCrypt whole disk encryption on my laptop, just in case it gets stolen. Unfortunately Acronis can only back this up sector-by-sector, which is insane: my old backups were 10 GB in size; my new backups would be 120 GB consisting mostly of encrypted empty space.

Leaving aside questions such as why TrueImage can't read the decrypted sectors when the NTFS driver clearly can, I am now after a program that can do the smart thing with TrueCrypt whole disk systems. I don't care if it's pay-for (unless it's something insane).

Any recommendations? Reminder: I already have a tool to do sector-by-sector backups, so I'm only interested in tools that can do better than that.

  • OS: Win7 32-bit
  • True Image: Home 2010
RomanSt
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2 Answers2

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I am using Acronis True Image too and I also have whole disk encryption in place and I make sure to backup my files almost daily. What could be irritating is that you can't backup the full drive but if you switch to the partition panel you should be able to select all partitions individually and then proceed to backup your drive just like you did before. Still you should store your backups on another encrypted drive as the backup files themselves will be unencrypted.

By the way I am using Win 7 (x64) SP 1 with TC 7.0a and Acronis True Image Home 2011 v14.0.0.6574

Christian Smorra
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Simplest approach of all:

Use the version of Acronis Workstation that supports AES encryption of image files, and create your images from within Windows, using the Acronis operation "Backup My Data" (and not "Backup My Computer").

That way, your backups are also secured.

That said, it would be a good idea not to encrypt your system disk, because I couldn't imagine how to add TrueCrypt to the Acronis Rescue CD. The Acronis CD is a Linux boot CD and could possibly be hacked to do TrueCrypt, but this is not a trivial task.

I would therefore suggest not to use TrueCrypt whole disk encryption, but rather to partition the disk into two parts : system and data, where data is TrueCrypt.

harrymc
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