Backing up a SSD boot drive

[Kingy1968]

Hi all...

Im wondering what, or if there is any, software is the best to use for backing up a SSD boot drive??

Ive always used Acronis True Image in the past but that was when I had a standard sata ii hard drive as my boot..

Ive read that the ssd has to be in the correct alignment.

Any help would be great....

 

[Kingy1968]

No one have any ideas if there is any software for doing this??

I was just wondering as if the boot drive goes down i dont fancy spending another 5 or 6 hours reinstalling all the stuff..... lol

Its just for a precautionary measure really....

 

[BlackBat]

Taken from the Acronis knowledge base:-

The following Acronis products have full Solid State Drive (SSD) support:

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11
Acronis True Image Home 2011
Acronis True Image Home 2012
Acronis Disk Director 11 Home

All other Acronis products support Solid State Drives (SSD) with certain limitations:

You can perform all the same operations with SSDs as with regular hard disk drives;
There are no special partition alignment mechanisms required to keep the partitions offset which is optimal for SSD drives. In other words when you restore an image to an SSD drive, it will get the default 63 sectors offset instead of 64kb (or a multiple of 64kb) offset recommended for SSD drives even if this offset was in place when the image had been created. This may result in a drop of performance on certain models of SSD drives after the restore;
Support for SSD drives is also planned for the next version of the Acronis Backup & Recovery product line.

 

[Kingy1968]

Right thats interesting then...

So it will restore but at the moment it wont do correct allignment on certain makes.

I wonder if they mean an update to this coming 2012 or next years 2013 version for the full support of ssd drives....

 

[jbloggs]

Assuming you are using Win 7, just use the built in Back and Restore utility, it is what I use...or you could try Macrium Reflect

Otherwise just use Acronis True Image (Home)...

(From my understanding), if the alignment is correct at time of backup, this will be maintained during the backup and if required to do a restore, during that as well...

 

[Zarf]

Use DD, it creates a byte for byte copy of the entire disk, boot sector, partition table, everything. You can use it to clone drives or create backup images.

Boot up an Ubuntu (or distro of choice) live CD/USB. Check the device names in Disk manager. Open a Terminal. Type

sudo dd if=/dev/<source> of=<destination> bs=4096 conv=noerror,sync