Thinkpads Forum

Does anyone know if it's better (more stable, reliable) to run Acronis TrueImage from a boot cd? Either when making disk images or when restoring them?

I'm new to Acronis (used to use Drive Image a lot in the day, have used an old version of Ghost a little bit, and I like carbon copy cloner on the Mac). I've been trying Acronis out over the last couple days and just recently had an image restore fail. It said the archive was corrupted. Of course it had already deleted the boot partition, so I had to go back to an older image, etc.

I was surprised to have such a serious problem only a couple of days into using the software.

It makes me wonder if it's not reliable to let Acronis do it's whole thing of booting into it's own stand alone mode (when restoring an image to the boot partition).

And, again, what about with creating the images? Is it also perhaps better to boot from a cd when creating backup images?

i never had any problem with acronis and i've been using it for almost 9 month. are you sure it wasnt any bad cluster where the image was saved?!

its ok from cd as well only that would take more time though to reading speed its lower than hdd.

it always better to have an backup on dvd as well in case the hdd fails completely. seriously i;m surprised you had pb with acronis, which i found it the most reliable recovery software.

dorin

From what I get from the acronis forums, the latest version of acronis has a problem using USB devices but is generally OK when shooting an image across the network or using an internal cd/dvd burner.
I had the same corrupted archive problem when I tried saving the image with a USB dvd burner or a USB hard drive. As soon as I saved the image file to a shared folder on another computer all was good. This was working from the boot cd.
Apparently earlier versions of acronis did not have this problem.

Thanks for the replies. I wasn't working with a usb device. I was restoring an image off of another partition on the same drive. (Don't worry I will save images to a DVD and other places as well.) I don't know if the problem was a bad cluster. I just got this corrupted archive message from Acronis. Now I'm using the verifying the archive procedure, right after I make every image.

I was surprised too by the failure. I've never had a problem with any other drive imaging software. I did read elsewhere that in older versions of Acronis it sometimes gave the corrupted archive message when the archive was not in fact corrupted. But this is supposed to have been fixed.

I also read that in order for Acronis to do it's stand alone reboot thing, it rewrites the master boot record (and then writes it back when it's done). Some people seem to think this is just a snafu waiting to happen and better to avoid. So I do think I'll adopt a practice of always booting from a cd for restores of the system partition, even though it's slower.

I have been using acronis 7 for a few years without problems, using DVDs and USB hard drives.

Recently I tried to partition my large hard drive (80GB), which failed with Partition Magic 8 (some unknown error, Symantec knows about this, but they don't care - at least in their FAQ). So I tried Acronis Disk Partitioner. it worked without problems and f***d up my drive. Could not boot anymore, only got a blank screen and a blinking cursor.

Then I recovered with Acronis Trueimage 7 from the USB drive, which took 1day 15 hours (!!!) for 55GB. I tried to install it first and then recover, and then also boot from disk and recover. Same result 1 day 15 hours. What a peace of s**t (!!). In some forums I read that Acronis uses a mini Linux OS that does not recognize DMA functions. At least it recovered my notebook. Puhh!

I am looking now for some other recovery software. What about this IBM Rescue and Recovery?
I killed it on my ThinkPad when I bought it, then it was called IBM rapid restore 3.0, the biggest piece of cr*p I have ever seen. Extremely slow and unreliable.
Has it improved in the meantime? Any help anybody?

A lot of people have had problems with Acronis 9. I personally bought Acronis 8 after 9.0's release because of that reason. They seem to be working on improvements (9.1 is apparantly a rewrite of a core part of the product).

I've been waiting until I hear more good things about 9.0 before the upgrade.

May want to try getting 8.0. I've been using it for a while, and can validate others who say Acronis is very stable and reliable.

beeblebrox wrote: Then I recovered with Acronis Trueimage 7 from the USB drive, which took 1day 15 hours (!!!) for 55GB. I tried to install it first and then recover, and then also boot from disk and recover. Same result 1 day 15 hours. What a peace of s**t (!!). In some forums I read that Acronis uses a mini Linux OS that does not recognize DMA functions. At least it recovered my notebook. Puhh!

It seems they have not managed to improve on this - True Image 9 also took a horrible amount of time when restoring from my USB-drive. On one forum I visited people said that TI does not know how to handle many USB2-controllers, and runs them as USB1.1 instead. I now do my restoring by booting with a Reatogo XPE-Disk, and run TI9 from there. Unlike TI9 on its own, the XPE-system knows how to properly use USB2-ports, and the speed has improved significantly.