Backup Strategies: R&R vs. Acronis

[ArtShapiro]

Last night I had the unfortunate experience of having Patch Tuesday's updates kill my Vista Ultimate T42. It bluescreened upon restart, and even attempts to repair from the Vista DVD reported failure.

I've just used Acronis to recover from a February partition made when I was trying the 15-day trial of True Image 10. It worked fine, and currently scads of updates are being installed from Microsoft. All critical data had been manually moved to other machines or to various backup drives periodically over the intervening months, so this is just some nuisance loss of time.

But it would have been nice to have a more recent backup just to minimize this nuisance value. My desktop is backed up daily using Retrospect, and I'm trying to decide what to do for this laptop. A weekly backup would be more than sufficient.

Before I go out and purchase the Acronis, which seems to be an excellent, Vista-compatible product, can anyone tell me if that strategy would be better/worse/equivalent to using R&R? I guess the IBM product is free (correct?) but does it do partition backup or merely file backup? Clearly for out-of-the-ordinary failures such as mine, a partition restoration is most appropriate; for accidentally lost or corrupted files a file-based capacity is needed. So having the choice of either is a real plus.

Advice is welcome!

Art

[bill bolton]

In my expereince True Image 10 is a MUCH more pleasent user experience than R&R.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[Kyocera]

ditto's to what bill said, acronis is so flexible, user friendly and not only that it works

[furrycute]

Can you guys elaborate on why Acronis is better than Rescue and Recovery?

And what about Norton Ghost?

I've heard that Ghost created some corrupt backup copies, and I have also heard that Acronis created some corrupt backup copies. At this point, I am just not so sure about any of these backup products anymore.

[Kyocera]

Have not used ghost for about two years, so I can't speak to any of the newer versions, it was difficult to jump in and use without reading through the instruction manual to get things to work correctly, rather than just dig in and go. I've used Acronis on a couple of our machines at work to perform full and run incremetental backups to external media and have used it to clone more than 20 laptop and desktop drives and don't remember having anywhere near the pain I had using ghost.

If you're backing up with RnR to external media and it is working for you then use it, it's free right? If your backing up to your local drive, I don't see the point really, that's just may opinion though, backing up data to the same hard drive that could fail is not really backing up, it's wasting HD space, system resources, etc.

[K0LO]

ArtShapiro:

Your experience (and I had a similar one once) is the reason that I have an automatic Acronis TrueImage backup scheduled for the morning of each Patch Tuesday. You never know when one of the updates will run amok and kill your system. It doesn't happen very often but, as you know, it CAN happen.

It's nice to be able to restore to the morning's backup and be back up and running in 15 mins or so.

Your strategy is a good one. A full partition backup is the most useful. With TrueImage Home 10 you can double-click on your backup image file and browse through it to recover individual files if needed.

[GomJabbar]

One of the main detractions of Rescue and Recovery (as of version 3 anyway) is that it is dog slow to perform a backup to optical media.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=17683

Also, Rescue and Recovery is not very flexible for recovering individual files and folders from backups.