Acronis True Image.

j razz

This has been discussed frequently -- at least three times in the past year. Here is a link to the last discussion:

hard drive backup tips wanted

As soon as I read the subject line I was thinking Acronis. But you guys beat me to it. I have used expensive Veritas Enterprise products to freebies that come with Maxtor harddives and I have to say that there is nothing as good as Acronis. Here is what I like (and I'm sure many companies do this now, but I know Acronis)

1) It allows you to make a bootable CD-rom that runs the full backup program with driver support for USB and firewire devices (this means you DON'T have to reinstall Windows before recovering data if you replace the harddrive).

2) The bootable CD program looks and acts just like it does when booted into windows (with mouse support) so you don't have to much around trying to figure stuff out.

3) Easy backup & recovery wizards.

4) It uses some sort of image technology that takes a snap shot of your system, just like an imagining program. I think everyone should make a fresh image of their system in the beginning to make a "flush-and-fill" easy.

Example: First, You install Acronis and backup your machine to an external drive (DVD or CDs or tape) using the step be step wizard. Second, You make a bootable CD with the Acronis wizard. Then a power surge wipes out your harddive and you have to buy a new one. Replace the defective drive, hookup your external backup drive, pop in the Acronis bootable CD you created and point to the external drive and your backup folder. Click finish. When done, take out the Acronis CD and bingo, back in business.

Some other programs make you reinstall windows, then the backup program before you can restore your system. Acronis skips that step be giving you a bootable CD to work from. It's awesome. Go try the demo.

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/

You can get Acronis True Image 9.0 for $33 (shipping included) from NewEgg.com http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=377.

This is an outright steal. I am using this product, and it is incredible. (I'm actually using the worstation 9.1 version for its 64 bit windows support, but it's essentially the same thing). As much as can be possible for something like a drive backup program, they have idiot-proofed it. As long as your hard drive is intact, you don't even need a boot disk, just press F11 during a boot to start restoring your image. And of course you can make a boot / rescue CD. This program, in both its Windows and boot up interfaces, will surf your network to find your backup file, even prompting you for domain passwords as needed. Awesome!

The program even lets you (if desired) make a hidden partition for keeping backups. The advantage of this is that if you get a virus on your machine, it won't see or touch this hidden partition. (Of course there could someday be a clever virus that'll hit it, but this should be rare).

Also it can make a full backup of your system drive while you are still using it in Windows (no need to run the backup software from a boot disk).

Acronis True Image in conjunction with Retrospect backup.

Prefect combination. Used for years. Works terrific.

This is not a hijack but rather a hitchhike.

I've never tried this but suppose I want to buy a new computer. How to migrate all that software without crashing the old system's drivers against the new system's hardware?

Assuming you can still see both your system drive and you either have room on that drive for an image, or that you can also still see your CD/DVD-writer.....
then:
Deleting the PCIbus from device manager before you instigate the backup is a fairly certain way to have the recovery automatically detect your hardware on rebuild. The fact that you've deleted it ought to go into the recoveey version, but this is a bit hit and miss as it really depends on what you are backing up to and restoring from. ie There are dependencies.

Other than this, rebuild with something you already have (ghost etc) and at the time of boot - go into safe mode, then delete the PCIbus entries. If you can. Then when you boot normally, you should be in similar shape as you would with a fresh install - but you'll have all the other apps and your data files from the backup archive. YMMV.

Cristie have a product by the name of CBMR, it is expensive but it is absolutely intended to backup, incrementally backup too and restore to differing hardware.
Cristie CBMR website IBM woke up to it a long time ago. Which will probably keep the price at the enterprise level. These folks really rock. I believe it is one of the IT industries little gems and best kept secrets. ;-)

>>How to migrate all that software without crashing the old
>>system's drivers...

I would never do this whatsoever. There are just too many variables.

What I do if I build a new system is just redo everything. It's a pain, but it's a lot less headache in the long run.

Thanks all. Acronis it is!

My guru buddy uses the old Norton dos version (2003) of Goback which is installed after everything else is installed. You need another harddrive. He showed me how it works by deleting a ton of windows files and applications and then hitting the goback thing and everything was fully restored after reboot. You have to update the goback file every couple of weeks to keep it up to date. It took about 5 minutes to restore everything. He also hates Norton stuff.

JJK

If you go to newegg and sort the comments on Acronis by "Sort by lowest rating" there are quite a few recent customers that have not been able to do restores. Too bad Powerquest got bought by Symantec.

Larry

If you go to newegg and sort the comments on Acronis by "Sort by lowest rating" there are quite a few recent customers that have not been able to do restores. Too bad Powerquest got bought by Symantec.

There were 7 bad reviews on NewEgg. I haven't had any of these problems. None whatsoever. I'm sure none of the other posters here did either. No software is perfect, though, so I don't doubt that somebody had a problem. I've tried using other products and found the boot disk didn't work for networking at all, and was a big hassle. In contrast, Acronis was able to surf my entire company's domain from a boot CD that took me five minutes to burn with my CD-RW.

How to migrate all that software without crashing the old system's drivers against the new system's hardware?

Acronis sells an additional component for $20 that they say will allow you to migrate to a different hardware. I never tried it and have no idea if it works or not, but it's a very interesting idea.

I am currently using Ghost, and didn't have any problems so far, but as there are now more machines running where drive imaging needs to be done, I would be interested to know if people that have tried TrueImage and Ghost prefer Ghost or TrueImage and what the advantages of the one or the other are.

>>I haven't had any of these problems...
>>...I'm sure none of the other posters here did either...

I know a few years ago I had a run of images *not* restoring with Powerquest's Drive Image.

I have not yet had an image not restore using True Image.

Acronis 8.0 was a total failure on both systems it was installed on. The testing was done by a full time computer professional.

It took over 100 hours to get a response from Acronis in reply to an E-mail. Once we had their attention, their timeliness improved.

I am envious of those for whom it works so well. It had several highly positive reviews. For me - a complete waste of money.

It took over 100 hours to get a response from Acronis in reply to an E-mail.

When did this happen? I just asked them a question last week and got a response in less than 10 hours.