This article shows the easiest way to restore a Windows computer from a backup: restore the system disk to the original disk from within running Windows.

Pre-requisites

1. Computer boots successfully and you are able to get to the Desktop screen.

2. Acronis True Image is installed.

3. You have a backup to restore from.

Solution

1. Launch Acronis True Image:

2. Click Backup to access your backups:

3. In the Backup section, select the backup which contains the partitions or disks you want to recover, then open the Recovery tab, and then click Disks.

4. By default, the software restores everything to the date of the last successful backup. If you would like to roll back to one of the previous states, open the Backup version drop-down list in the upper top corner of the screen and select one of the available recovery points:

5. Click the checkbox next to the disk that is going to be restored. If there are several checkboxes, mark them all to recover everything:

6. As you mark the checkboxes, the software tries to automatically find the original disk to be overwritten by backup contents:

7. If the program is unable to automatically find the disk where the backup originated from, you see Select disk text instead of the disk name on the right side. In this case, click it and click the system disk name from the drop-down list. The list of available disk partitions is displayed in grey to facilitate the disk selection:

8. Click the green Recover now button in the right bottom corner of the screen:

9. Click Yes to accept that the disk selected on the right side will be completely overwritten by the disk version from the backup:

10. The program asks for a computer restart to start the restore. Click Restart to reboot the computer:

11. Starting from this point, recovery goes in a fully automated mode. You can watch the progress or leave the computer unattended. The time required to complete restoration depends on the amount of data to process, read/write speed of the system disk, the device where the backup is stored and the connection between them:

If you leave for a long time, you can enable the checkbox to shut down computer automatically when it finishes restoring.