Comments

jetdv wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:13 AM
I've been happy with Acronis.
Paul_Holmes wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:15 AM
I've been using Acronis for a couple years. Works perfectly and user-friendly. In the past Norton Ghost was knocked for being hard to configure and use. I don't know if that has changed.

I end up reloading my system every 3 or 4 months. Total time to get the system back in perfect working order ends up being 4 or five hours versus a couple days, reloading everything from scratch.
routerguy99 wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:41 AM
I've been happy with Acronis, seems to be more stable, less headach
DGrob wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:48 AM
Some powerful recommendations. Thanks. Darryl
kentwolf wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:53 AM
>>...I've been happy with Acronis...

Same here. Works great. I use it all the time.
psg wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:55 AM
Acronis has a free trial you can use for a limited period.

I used it to clone a c: drive for a laptop and it easy to use and worked well. It convinced me to buy a copy.
riredale wrote on 9/14/2007, 9:55 AM
Wow--Acronis really seems to have taken over.

I've been through a half-dozen backup and imaging products over the past decade, from built-in Windows to Ghost to DriveImage to Ghost to Retrospect to Acronis, with a few others whose names escape me at the moment.

Retrospect is a wonderful backup product and one which produces very small files, but the interface is odd and it is not so efficient at "bare metal" backups (backups from a totally blank drive, without Windows and Retrospect already loaded). DriveImage and Ghost were great for bare metal but not so good at pulling individual files out of the image or doing incremental backups.

Acronis seems to do everything. It can do full (image) backups and then do incremental backups on top of that. You can boot to an Acronis CD (running Linux, incidentally) and do a complete restoration to bare metal. You can mount an image from a particular day and pull a file from it.

Two issues, though. Acronis makes large backups, so you'll run through your disk space faster. Each incremental backup is maybe 3 or 4GB on my system versus 500MB in Retrospect. But then it's no big deal to get a 200GB backup drive for, what, $70?

The other issue is that the boot CD can fail on many laptops, requiring a workaround. All in all, though, it seems that Acronis is the software to use (for the moment, anyway).
routerguy99 wrote on 9/14/2007, 12:05 PM
"The other issue is that the boot CD can fail on many laptops, requiring a workaround. All in all, though, it seems that Acronis is the software to use (for the moment, anyway)."

I use a boot USB Flash drive, and Have a Boot cd as a backup. :)
blink3times wrote on 9/14/2007, 1:16 PM
I use BOOTitNG. It's a boot manager with built in partition tools (including disk imaging). Been using it for years and it hasn't failed me yet. It operates completely independent of your respective os's, so it can be used with ANY os... even linux