Acronis True Image 2013 (hereafter referred to as ATI2013) is a professional-grade disk, partition or file backup tool. Under normal circumstances, people often use it to back up hard disk, partition or user files as TIB files, and supply the original state for emergency recovery. In fact, TIB files can be used in two other ways and are more efficient to use. In addition to directly restoring the original state, TIB backups can be used as a backup of hard disks, partitions, or as file-level backups, and can be used at any time by "Browse" or "virtualization". We can browse the image and file-level backups directly and get any useful content. In addition, you can virtualize it into a drive letter, just like using a CD, and then extract useful data from it. This way, you don't have to restore the entire partition or disk data every time, just like the traditional method, in order to pick data from it. Tip: ATI2013 is compatible with the latest Windows 8.1 system. And still work perfectly on XP and all subsequent versions of Windows. However, please note that if you are using Windows 8 or higher, please do not use the ATI version lower than 2013. 1. Direct extraction of TIB content Whether our data is a TIB backup formed as a hard disk or disk partition, or a TIB backup formed as a folder, you can view their contents by directly opening and extracting and selecting Copy the file to your hard disk for use. In Windows Explorer, simply double-click on the corresponding TIB backup file to preview and manipulate the content (Figure 1). Tip: When copying a file from a backup that is being viewed, the copied file will lose the "compressed" and “encrypted” attributes. If you want to keep these properties, it is recommended to restore the backup. 2. Virtual Disk Method for Partitioned Image We can use the hard disk or partitioned TIB backup file as a drive letter so that they can be accessed just like a physical drive. After the drive is virtualized, it has the following features: a new disk with its own code name will be displayed in the drive list; by using Windows Explorer and other file managers, you can view the image content as you would on a physical disk or partition; how to use the virtual disk As with physical disks, opening, saving, copying, moving, creating, deleting files or folders are fully supported. You can also load the image in read-only mode if necessary. Step 1. In ATI2013, select the “Tools & Utilities” tab and click the “Load Image” button in the lower right corner to enter the TIB file loading window. Step 2. Select the TIB backup file to be loaded by the list (the TIB location that the software remembers itself) or the “Browse” button (find the user-defined TIB file in other locations) (Figure 2). If the selected TIB file is an image backup with incrementals, you can browse the data status at a certain moment by selecting any time to incremental backup by creation time. However, if you are loading an incremental image, you must have all previous backup versions and initial full backups. If one of these backup series files is missing, it will not be loaded. If the load is affected as a differential image, it must also be based on the initial full image. Step 3. At this time, the system will display the summary of the partition impact to be loaded, including the drive code, file system type, partition size and other information. Loading an image can only be done in partitions, and the entire disk cannot be loaded unless there is only one partition. If the image contains multiple partitions, all partitions will be selected and loaded by default, and the drive letter will be automatically assigned. If you need to assign a drive letter to a partition, click the “options> (Figure 3). Select the virtual disk designator you want to specify from the "Load Code" drop-down list. If you don't want to load the partition, select “do not load ” or “clear the partition" from the list (Figure 4). Tip: If you need to modify the files in the loaded image partition, you need to select the “Load partition in read-write mode” checkbox. After this, the system will create an incremental backup file to save the changes. In this case, it is recommended to mark the changes in the comments section of this file. The wizard displays an optional comment step for commenting. After the above settings are completed, go to the next step, the system will prompt “ specify the disk drive code successfully completed & rdquo; prompt. After completing the above operations, you can perform operations on the files or folders of the virtual disk as you would on a physical disk. Tip: The above only supports FAT and NTFS file systems. Also note that although file backups and disk/partition images have the same default extension <;TIB”, only images can be loaded. If it is a TIB backup as a file, to view the file backup content, you can only view the files in the TIB by the above method of “Browse”. The uninstallation of TIB virtual disk drives is somewhat similar to our daily uninstallation of ISO virtual images. Unmounting the virtual disk drive can be done in Windows Explorer by right-clicking on the disk icon and selecting “True Image→Uninstall" (Figure 5). You can also use the ATI2013 software interface to select the command, click on the “Uninstall Image” button on the “Tools & Utilities” tab, then select the disk to be uninstalled and click “OK”. Note that if multiple image partitions are loaded at the same time, uninstall them with the ATI2013 interface. By default, all partitions will be selected for uninstallation. At this point, you can selectively unmount the partition and keep the partition you want to continue using. Tip: Because virtual files will invade a large amount of system resources during the virtual disk, it will give users a feeling of uncomfortable operation. Therefore, after the virtual disk is used, it should be uninstalled in time. Of course, if the system configuration is high, the impact is not great, and it doesn't matter if you ignore it. Because the virtual disk will disappear after the next shutdown after shutting down the computer. This article comes from [System Home] www.xp85.com