Image Backup Slutions - An Observation

[BuzzBuzzard]

I tore my hair out numerous times when Windows 98 would crash and I would have to reload my computers and that prompted me to look for a solution. I found Ghost and down went the stress. As years went by I found Ghost not to be as reliable on later opeating systems as it was with Windows 98 and looked for something better. I tried a new version of Ghost and was very disappointed - It was Ghost Version 9 - probably the worst version ever produced, in my opinion. I soon discarded that. I tried other products, the latest being Acronis and was, again disappointed. A couple of years went by and I continued to use the old DOS-based Ghost, but I wasn't happy with it. I got curious as to whether or not Symantec had eventually come out with a better version of Ghost. Looking around the 'net I found info on Ghost Version 14. On reading some reviews I decided to give it a try. I found it fast and reliable and can now finally do backups to and restore them from a USB hard drive, which I was unable to do before. I am quite pleased with it, but I am still open to any suggestions on other solutions. If there is something much better out there, please post your opinion.

[basketb]

You may get more feedback, if you post this in the Thinkpad - General HARDWARE/SOFTWARE questions forum. A mod maybe even able to move this thread for you, if you wish.

Admin note: Moved from T6x forum

[RealBlackStuff]

Would you mind mentioning the Acronis TrueImage Version(s) you tried?
Lots of fans for Acronis here (including me).
I used to use the original Powerquest DriveImage until Symantec did its customary destructive torpedoing of a great product.
Then switched to Acronis.

[kpinitreal]

I agree with RealBlackStuff, Acronis is the bomb. You can make a recovery zone one your hard drive and it will give you the option before booting to go into recovery. I can also make a recovery disk that supports usb. It is the best I have tried. Acronis that is. I use version 10 home. does the job and I can not complain.

Cheers
Phil

[Marin85]

I agree with RealBlackStuff, Acronis is the bomb. You can make a recovery zone one your hard drive and it will give you the option before booting to go into recovery. I can also make a recovery disk that supports usb. It is the best I have tried. Acronis that is. I use version 10 home. does the job and I can not complain.

Cheers
Phil

I second that! Acronis Secure Zone has saved my @$$ a few times (but I had to remove it due to lack of HD space ). I don´t know why you were that disappointed by Acronis (there was a period when they had some problems with bugs in v11, but this is all resolved as of know I believe).

[gator]

One more vote for Acronis ... saved me numerous times.

[bill bolton]

I got curious as to whether or not Symantec had eventually come out with a better version of Ghost. Looking around the 'net I found info on Ghost Version 14.

IMO the Ghost product line lost the plot a while back.

Like others above, I have been using Acronis True Image (through several successive versions) for both cloning and backup purposes with consistently good results.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[crashnburn]

I agree with RealBlackStuff, Acronis is the bomb. You can make a recovery zone one your hard drive and it will give you the option before booting to go into recovery. I can also make a recovery disk that supports usb. It is the best I have tried. Acronis that is. I use version 10 home. does the job and I can not complain.

Cheers
Phil

One more vote for Acronis.

[xwray]

I highly recommend Image for DOS from Terabyte Unlimited. I constantly fool around with my systems and frequent mess them up to the point where I don't want to spend time troubleshooting for the exact problem so I restore them perfectly with this program. I especially like the fact that it needs nothing from the hard drive to work and there are no gotchas to contend with from something running on the system you're tryig to back up. You boot to a simple DOS boot device - floppy, USB thumb drive, ext USB drive - whatever your system can boot from and run the program where you are given the option to backup or restore your drive. It has never failed me and I've given it lots of opportunities to do so. The only caveat is that you cannt back up to the same drive you are backing up...you need a different drive partition or physical drive, either internal or external.

[AGoodSolution]

The resounding numbers of votes for Acronis are there for a reason, it is very straightforward and fairly fast plus has excellent compression ratios even when working with compressed partions.

You could configure your ThinkPad similar to a corporate server model where the OS resides on dedicated drives / partitions while your data on a different partition.

Create a 5GB partition or other size that will fit your operating system directories, relocate your pagefile to the data partition.

I still haveing figured out a way to relocate hiberfil.sys and would welcome anyone who knows how.

But the point is to cleave up the hard drive to allow you breathing room but not where you're wasting space on your "C:\" drive.

Then, you could install the SecureZone and even without a CD - ROM or even having to install the100MB + windows version of Acronis.... you could reboot your system into the dedicated miniLinux Acronis kernel and backup your C drive directly to the DATA partition.

One of the last posters to this question gave you some good advice but pointed out that his imaging solution can't backup to the same drive, / this may not be wholly accurate since most imaging applications can't perform backup operations to the same partition since obviously this would be a infinite data backup since it would be backing up its current backup process.

But every imaging solution should be able to backup to a different partition on the same drive unless you're talking about the esoteric field of disk forensics and sector / sector data recovery.

I can backup a 5GB XPSP3 partition with Office2003 and other "mission critical" core apps installed to the same stripped down C partition and then verify the data in less than 15 minutes.

The result is about 3GB *.tib file which is then burned to a DVD even with a bootable Acronis sector so that DVD could be used to restore the OS or just particular files in about the same amount of time assuming I execute a verify of the restoration.

The installed windows application has an archive explorer function just like ghostexp.exe and can mount the tib files as virtual drive letters in read only or write mode.

You even just double click a Tib file w/o mounting it and it will open up along even reflecting the directory structure as if you TAR'd or RAR'd up a directory with its subfolders.

Another cool application (but not as necessary since VirtualPC started including conversion functions) is to Acronis up existing physical PC's then lay the *.tib file into a virtual machine after performing some driver detections but this isn't as necessary with VPC converters but occassionally the virtual converters errror out and you have to rely on a real drive image.

Acronis is worth the $100+ and you get free updates for a year.

[davidhbrown]

Under Vista Ultimate x86 SP1 I have tried Ghost 12, Ghost 14 (insignificantly different from 12 except if you want to back up over the network), Retrospect 7.6 (which I liked best under XP, but it's essentially unusable with UAC), and even tried scripting Robocopy. But chalk me up as another Acronis user.

Acronis's error messages stink. It will send you an email for every job completed, but not give you any special notification of problems, except through alerts. It never tells you more than a drive number and sector if it gets a read error; it doesn't tell you what backup job it was working on. Editing job settings is a pain; figuring out how to keep using the current backup set is confusing. It likes to leave temporary files in the backup directory. It seems to take absolutely forever to run incremental backups of my HDD (250GB) to a USB2 drive.

But all those problems aren't the fundamentals: I can restore the backups; the backups are almost always there (I do have to keep an eye on it); it doesn't hide its user interface in a separate logon like Retrospect; it doesn't corrupt the filesystem like Ghost did to me. And my system is still usable while it's working.