What Disk Imaging Program Do You Use in the Windows 10 Era?

[w0qj]

Just curious, so what Disk Imaging Program Do You Use in the Windows 10 Era?

1. For our (soon-to-End-Of-Life) Windows 7, we found the ThinkVantage Rescue And Recovery (RnR) very useful!
Just customise each computer's Win7 environment, make image with RnR!
One can revert to such a Disk Image Snapshot in just 15 minutes!

But alas, ThinkPad had ended development for ThinkVantage Rescue And Recovery; RnR is not supported under Windows 10.

2. So what Disk Imaging Program Do You Use in the Windows 10 Era?
******We need a quick/nimble solution that can revert a ThinkPad back to a previous Disk Image Snapshot within 15-30 minutes!

a) Do you use Win10 Create Recovery Drive?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this?

b) Do you use a freeware program to create/store Disk Imaging?

c) Did you pay for a program (eg: Acronis True Image, etc.) for such a purpose?
******We are willing to pay for a program *ONCE* to cover all our computers (you can almost count these with the fingers on both your hands), but we *refuse* to pay for per-computer Disk Imaging service, which would add up very quickly when you scale up the number of ThinkPads & desktop machines that you may add.

d) No, we do not want to do disk image back into the Cloud, not comfortable with putting our stuff onto the cloud.

Your experience and input would be greatly appreciated!

[dr_st]

Acronis True Image is reliable, but yeah, you would be unhappy because it is per-computer. They have 1, 3 and 5-machine licenses, but I don't know the cost, and is the 5 PC enough for you.

Check Macrium Reflect; it has a free edition.

[Thinkpad4by3]

I use Paragon Drive Copy and it has saved my butt so many times....its like I think 50-70$ for life.

[RealBlackStuff]

If you make a TrueImage CD (and probably also a USB-stick), you can use it on ANY PC or laptop...

[theterminator93]

We use FOG in our production environments at work. A little more setup involved but it's quick and snappy to restore whenever needed.

[w0qj]

Wow, many thanks for everyone's very quick and helpful replies!

We really miss our ThinkVantage Rescue & Recovery...

[artic_squirrel]

macrium reflect is free for home and pro i think, it is non-free for big business i think. It can make an image of a 50GB partition in 10 minutes and 160GB in 30m/ That's with a SSD in sata 3.

[AndyMH]

Clonezilla and redo, but I'm linux!

[olddog]

I had never cloned a hard disk until last week, and downloaded Macrium Reflect with some trepidation.

The whole process needed about three clicks of the mouse and then I went for a short walk. When I returned it was all over and the new SSD booted first time and is very fast.

I couldn't believe how easy it was.

And, as others have pointed out, the program is free.

[w0qj]

Many thanks yet again to everyone for their time and suggestions!

Easy to use Disk Imaging programs are now very common nowadays, more of a commodity...

1) We have decided to standardize on AOMEI OneKey Recovery, AOMEI Backupper, and AOMEI Partition Assistant.
All of these have lifetime licence option for free upgrades.

(We got sick of Acronis [True Image, & also Disk Director] asking us to upgrade to a newer version that support the newest features, despite buying it not long ago).

2) AOMEI OneKey Recovery Pro very closely mimics ThinkVantage Rescue & Recovery,
and both can save the Disk Image onto an external storage also.
You can also use OneKey Recovery to create a hidden "factory reset partition", and save your Disk Image there.
ie: Very closely mimics ThinkVantage Rescue & Recovery.

Just giving back to the community; sharing our findings...

(Note: I do not work for AOMEI ! Just an avid fellow ThinkPad user.)

[keithsketchley]

True Image Image 2013 had very good features, but a defect that prevented test restore to an HDD of less capacity than the one imaged.

IIRC cause appeared to be a meta value put in the image which mis-represented the image size by giving a value well above the actual space used as verified by another value displayed in attempt to restore to smaller drive. Source was an SSD, free space has to be understood on SSDs, target was an HDD.

Acronis refused to accept that they had a defect, refused to check their software despite clues I gave them, wanted me to reveal my data.

I checked the list of changes for a few subsequent years, not fixed, have not checked recent years.

(I want to always test an image, restoring to an older HDD of smaller size is convenient, but so would be using the image to load a replacement drive that is smaller because it is an SSD.)

[keithsketchley]

I dug out old info on disk cloning/imaging/backup software and verified links I will provide below.

General information is in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... g_software

Expert TIH user Grover has guides, such as at:
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/best-pr ... -solutions REF
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/best-pr ... ore-guides REF
In some of his articles he gives explicit precautions. From memory and my experience with drive identification in Windows XP and 7, and various applications, you have to be very careful with identification of drives (which different software may identify differently) and be sure you apply the right command to the right drive. Knowledge of drive characteristics in general is helpful. Having only one target drive in the computer and one source media preferably outside the computer is a good approach.
(These days you may image to a large USB memory stick, 256GB are readily available, I have not seen affordable 512GB sticks that I’d have confidence in – Amazon sells only high priced and very cheap thus suspect ones.)

[keithsketchley]

Here are several possibilities, I have not examined them. (I may just license a newer version of True Image, as the program was good in general, first I’ll review lists of changes and read threads I found plus more of Grover’s articles.

www.acronis.com
Still available.
Some users had problems using it but eventually succeeded after fixing disk errors with chkdsk and other methods, but I don’t see that as the cause of my problem with TIH2013.
One expert user had restored to smaller drives, then had to resize some partitions. https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis ... urce-drive REF
I’ve downloaded newer change lists but have not had time to read them.


http://www.karenware.com/
Replicator software
Straightforward website mostly.

http://www.macrium.com/
Reflect software

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hd ... nload.html
Hard Disk Manager Suite

http://www.easeus.com/backup-software/

[Nportman]

I am using Paragon backup and recovery. It's a free tool totake system backup.

[exTPfan]

Another vote for Macrium Reflect (free edition).

[cadillacmike68]

True Image Image 2013 had very good features, but a defect that prevented test restore to an HDD of less capacity than the one imaged.

IIRC cause appeared to be a meta value put in the image which mis-represented the image size by giving a value well above the actual space used as verified by another value displayed in attempt to restore to smaller drive. Source was an SSD, free space has to be understood on SSDs, target was an HDD.

Acronis refused to accept that they had a defect, refused to check their software despite clues I gave them, wanted me to reveal my data.

I checked the list of changes for a few subsequent years, not fixed, have not checked recent years.

(I want to always test an image, restoring to an older HDD of smaller size is convenient, but so would be using the image to load a replacement drive that is smaller because it is an SSD.)

???

I do this all the time and with Acronis TI 2011. I just got TI 2016 (cheap) and TI 2020 and DD12.5 (good deal offer from acronis). Just last week I just backed up a 500GB HDD (with less than 100GB on it) and restored to a 250GB HDD so I would have a fall back in case I mess up a custom build on a T530.

I installed TI 2011 on a system, but had to kick it off because it kept causing win7P to reboot. That drove me nuts until I found out that TI2011 was not compatible with win7 if installed on the system.

Didn't matter because I already made the boot-able CDs of TI2011 and DD2010 and always used those to back up and restore. And as RBS says, the CD will boot and backup any HDD or restore to any other.

I just won't get their subscription for cloud backups, etc. No thanks, local storage is very inexpensive.

So my vote is for Acronis and the forum guy Grover is excellent.


And Karens Replicator (RIP Karen) is excellent for file by file backups where you don't want to back up the entire HDD or disk partition. I have it set up so I can back up the data files to different backup HDDs that are either in the ultrabays or external USB connected, or NAS drives. Very flexible, and once set up, a few mouse clicks and off it goes.

It's great for syncing computers too. Just set up in reverse and you can easily sync two or more computers if they are set up the same way. It's on all my ThinkPads currently in use. And Acronis forum guy Grover is the person who first told me about it some 9 years ago.

[kfzhu1229]

I use a Chinese software called Diskgenius. There is an English version and it works just as well.
I first used that software in a time when Windows PE USB bootable drives are the new hotness among tech enthusiasts in China and that software is typically included in those bootable drives' environment.
And that software is still extremely popular if you walk into a repair shop in Beijing or Shenzhen, China

[Muse]

I have upgraded the M.2 SSDs in both my Lenovo P1's (Gen 1, Gen 3) to Samsung 1TB SSD's recently. First one (Gen 1) went smoothly using Samsung Migration Tool, the other one I did yesterday and the tool would crash immediately. SMT works if the target SSD is Samsung.

Searching revealed that Bitlocker can cause this. I turned off Bitlocker on the Gen 3 machine and the migration worked. I then checked out the Gen 1 machine, wondering if Bitlocker was on and it was OFF. Why did the Gen 1 machine ship with Bitlocker OFF and the Gen 3 machine with Bitlocker ON? I certainly never turned it off on the Gen 1 machine, it must have shipped that way. Ah, come to think of it, it was an open box machine, maybe the first user turned it OFF!

[w0qj]

Yeah, it is strange. Similar situation for us:

1) Our X1 Extreme Gen 1 (X1E1), and Bitlocker was definitely "OFF" upon arrival (and Bitlocker was also "OFF" upon Product Recovery USB Thumbdrive install, which we also tried).

2) Our recent X1 Extreme Gen 3 (X1E3), and Bitlocker was "ON" by default.
We have had to search the internet for the command line on how to switch Bitlocker off!!

...Searching revealed that Bitlocker can cause this. I turned off Bitlocker on the Gen 3 machine and the migration worked. I then checked out the Gen 1 machine, wondering if Bitlocker was on and it was OFF. Why did the Gen 1 machine ship with Bitlocker OFF and the Gen 3 machine with Bitlocker ON? I certainly never turned it off on the Gen 1 machine, it must have shipped that way. Ah, come to think of it, it was an open box machine, maybe the first user turned it OFF!

[keithsketchley]

To ensure I've said:

Problem with TrueImage mis-representing drive size may be that drive has errors on it.

So run scandisk, defrag, and while you are at it sfc (System File Checker), before you make the image.

I used v2013 in Windows 7.

Takes some learning.