WD Smartware question

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1

Using Smartware how do you create an image of your OS drive and and also create an emergency Smartware Boot disk so you can restore your computer in the event of a hard drive crash or nasty virus or other catastrophe. After working with Smartware for a week it appears all you can do is back up your files but can’t restore a crashed system without starting fresh with your install OS disk and then when all your programs are reinstalled you restore your files that you have backed.up.

I used Acronis for years and that would do images and recovery’s easily. I was hoping I could use the 4tb hard drive in My Cloud to accomplish the same thing. I tried using Acronis 2014  with my cloud drive but gave up the fight trying to jump through the hoops to configure it for the wd cloud. It was one roadblock and nightmare after another so for Acronis images I am continuing to use Acronis True Image 2014 with a 3tb second internal drive for image copies.

Am I missing something with Smartware backups or can you do full image and restores with the software? If so how?

If someone has successfully done an image and restore from their Cloud drive using Acronis True Image, I would love to see an easy step by step explanation as to how they did it in not too technical terms.

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YOu cannot do images of drives with Smartware, which is a filed based backup solution.

I used Acronis True Image. You can backup and validate your backups using ATI from Windows, but you cannot restore them from the NAS. I cannot explain why, but ATI deems the image corrupted when you restore, and the restore abort. As you know, it is highly recommended to start a restore from the Acronis recovery CD. If a restore fails when it started from Windows, your computer will be left in an unstable boot state (been there, done that).

To work around the issue, you have to copy the image to a USB disk, and then restore from the USB disk. A way to do that is to use Safepoints to backup to a USB disk the content of the NAS. This is what I was doing and it worked great.

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