I've done a complete backup with Acronis. Now what??

In the version I run Olpal, 2011, there is an option to either incremental backups, i.e. the differences or to do full backups but to keep the last two versions or as it was called Grandfather, Father, Son.
 
The differences version can be a little more difficult to restores as you need restore the master then the differences but takes less time to do the backups.

Hi,
 
In the old days, at mom's office, we did a master on Sunday and then incremental backups every day to ensure no loss of data. Luckily, and surprisingly enough, we never had to worry about data loss as far as I am aware from my time there. And the backups were all dated and marked properly and in the right place locked up.
 
At home, I always used "incremental" backups, but since that time, I do my backups on the files that I need to different drives manually so I have the copies of the work. For me, installing/reinstalling the programs is not an issue, and chasing down the right back up to get the proper piece you missed is more of a headache than it's worth.
 
Mind you, I'm not an admin, only a network at home for my computers, and that is vastly different, than an office! But simply doing images and restoring complete backups is too much of a waste of time. Mostly your "file/files" are not that big anyway, and should be easy to copy to your location.
 
NOTE: This precludes that you DO NOT allow programs to set their own location for files, because it will be all over your hard drive. All my files are in my own folder, split up in several portions so all I have to back up is that folder. I don't see the point of backing up all the doodoo from Microsoft Word, for example! Thus, I have a folder named "Files" and it has in it Writing/Poetry/Film/novels/short stories/criticisms //// etc ... etc and that is the ONLY place where everything goes. 

One thing that threw me off badly starting use Acronis was just that Incremental Backup.
Simple as I am, I figured the first backup can't be incremental, as there's nothing there to add something to.
But then, trying to do incremental backup on the first one, it wasn't possible. You need to choose the incremental mode in the beginning, only then is it possible to add only the new or changed data to the backup-string.
 
But in addition to that, I do manual per-file or per SONAR-project backups to be able to find the exact files I'm looking for. I find the "closed system" backups, where you can't separate individual files, quite unpractical.

With a 4tb drive, I'd just do new backups as you have plenty of space. After they're are year old or so you can decide if you want to keep the oldest

I've got about 3.5 TB to backup.  So it takes almost that whole drive to do a complete backup of my system.

The next thing to do is see if you can:
 
a) Restore a single file from Acronis via Windows.
b) Restore a single file from Acronis via your boot CD.
c) If you have another spare drive you could try and do a full restore.
 
It's generally best to make your own boot CD (via Acronis app) as drivers get copied across and it always copies the latest patched version of Acronis. If you use a NAS it's generally essential as your network drivers get copied over as well (well hopefully).
 

You know...I never considered that. Woah!

I just backup my whole system with all of my drives all at once. I don't bother with targeted backups don't see the point. You can still restore exactly what you need.

Thanks Jim, Ol pal. Will do.