Acronis, Ghost, Retrospect... which backup software?

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pipspeak · #1 Post by **pipspeak** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:02 am

As the title suggests, I'm looking for all feedback for the major backup software suites.

I'm leaning towards Acronis True Image (v10) but have also been reading that the latest version of Ghost (v12) is just as good. They seem to have similar features, but is one more reliable than the other and are there others I should be considering?

I actually won't use many of the features of the larger suites... just planning to do occasional hard drive images and more regular backups of folders etc. to an external HDD or DVD. A little more overall than RnR covers but perhaps not enough to warrant a Ghost-like app.

USSS · #2 Post by **USSS** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 12:37 pm

Retrospect gets my vote as it combines an image utility with a comprehensive backup solution. As you stated, it may offer more than you need at the moment.

I have used Sonic BackupMyPC for more than 7 years on my old Micron desktop system with excellent results for stability and ease of use. However, it does not offer an imaging utility.

#3 Post by **Kyocera** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 12:47 pm

Acronis also does imaging/backups, very user friendly and has a very good and reliable backup program, I've been using acronis on one of our PC's I set up to backup to a USB HD enclosure for a document storage program via scanned images we have running. It's also fully automatic.

#4 Post by **rkawakami** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 1:18 pm

And to complete the field...

I use Ghost 2003 on my systems to clone/backup onto a hard drive in the Ultrabay. It's not automatic, takes the system "off line", needs additional hardware (Ultrabay HD adapter, docking station, external floppy), but it works for me. Everything gets copied to another disk drive so if anything happens, I simply swap drives (3 minute operation in most cases) and get going again.

andrewb · #5 Post by **andrewb** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 4:49 pm

I have been a long term user of Acronis True Image (and latterly, with the add-on, Universal Restore, which allows for an image to be loaded onto a different hard drive if the need be).

I like the automatic scheduling and validation function together with virtual load facility and the e-mail notification of back up success (or failure) which is useful.

I find Acronis very reliable and easy to configure, albeit that I probably do not use many of the available functions.

As well as taking a daily image, I used also to do specific file back ups with R&R, but had problems, lost faith in the reliability of R&R and now only use Acronis.

steveg47 · #6 Post by **steveg47** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 8:49 pm

rkawakami wrote:And to complete the field...

I use Ghost 2003 on my systems to clone/backup onto a hard drive in the Ultrabay. It's not automatic, takes the system "off line", needs additional hardware (Ultrabay HD adapter, docking station, external floppy), but it works for me. Everything gets copied to another disk drive so if anything happens, I simply swap drives (3 minute operation in most cases) and get going again.

I used Ghost 2003 but switched to Ghost 11 since it supports Vista's new MBR format. Works like a champ with Vista. I have created a bootable cd to replace the floppy disc and have included third party drivers which support usb drives and usb optical burners. So far the usb driver (panasonic) has worked on every pc and laptop I have tried and even works with some usb pccards.

#7 Post by **jdhurst** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 8:54 pm

Ghost (which I have used) and Acronis (I have not) are good for image backups as already suggested. I use Ghost for clients, put the image on DVD's and when a user bashes their machine (not often, really), I pull out the DVD's and start them over.

If you just want to backup files and folders to a different drive (not an image), NT Backup (already on your PC) does admirably. I just set up a very small client with a 300GB external USB drive connected to their SBS server. I have 5 schedules (1 for each business day) that each runs weekly. NT Backup backs up the main data folders in about 15 minutes. Nothing for the user to do. Nice and slick. ... JDH

#8 Post by **carbon_unit** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 9:47 pm

Mike, I have a client that just bought a 500gb USB HD and he wants to backup a server with it. We are considering using Acronis for the software. Can I set up Acronis to automatically make an image of the HD once a month and do an incremental backup 5 night a week in between images? I would also like to set it up to only retain 3or 4 full images and then bump the oldest one every month. This is an older win2k server with a ~36gb raid so the image size should not be a problem.
He feels the tape drive is unreliable. I don't know what software he is using now with the tape drive, probably msbackup.

#9 Post by **Kyocera** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 10:09 pm

tim wrote:He feels the tape drive is unreliable. I don't know what software he is using now with the tape drive, probably msbackup

I think most people feel the same about tape drives anymore and are really trying to phase them out. I can tell you how I set up our machine and maybe this might be something to think about or possibly modify.

I set up two partitions on a 160 gig drive in a USB enclosure. I cloned the current C drive in the PC to the first partition, complete image, and set up a directory on the other partition for acronis to back up just the scanned data, did a full backup of the directory manually first and set acronis to do incrementals twice a week. If the drive fails in the PC I just take the HD out of the enclosure, install it and apply the full archive to the directory on the XP partition.

The backup utility that I have used is with acronis 9 (i know 10 is out now and hope it has the same or more functionality than 9) and will allow you to do what you need, you can browse the entire OS and select what files you want backed up what type of backup and with what frequency and like I mentioned after you set things up manually at the start it will back up automatically. No tapes to mess with. I would suggest plugging the USB enclosure into a UPS along with the server.

dr_st · #10 Post by **dr_st** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 1:36 am

I like Acronis myself. I tried Ghost before, but didn't like it, due to what was mentioned by Ray earlier - you have to boot into the Ghost interface to use it, it cannot back up onto same medium that is being backed up, and the earlier versions that I used didn't have as many options (for example creating DVD-size backups on the hard drive).

#11 Post by **carbon_unit** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 5:53 am

Mike, which version of Acronis are you talknig about, Home, Workstation or Server?

#12 Post by **Kyocera** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 9:05 am

http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/584/ ... ic9.th.png

Tim, this is what I use.

#13 Post by **rkawakami** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 9:50 am

dr_st wrote:I tried Ghost before, but didn't like it, due to what was mentioned by Ray earlier - you have to boot into the Ghost interface to use it, it cannot back up onto same medium that is being backed up, and the earlier versions that I used didn't have as many options (for example creating DVD-size backups on the hard drive).

From my almost 30 years of experience in backing up computer systems, I've never placed the backup copy on the same medium as the original source. Back in the day, there simply wasn't any extra room on the disk drives (we're talking 5-10MB disk packs the size of a large pizza and washing machine-sized 50MB disk drives). If I was fortunate enough to be using a system which had a second disk drive, then a disk-to-disk copy was made, otherwise it went on 9-track mag tape. Fast-forward to today and the backups I make are again disk-to-disk copies, but now it's 40-80GB drives. Perhaps it's the past history I've had with backup procedures which meant that I always brought the system down in order to do the backup. I don't really mind not being able to use my system(s) for the 15-20 minutes it takes to clone the data onto a separate drive and then store it in a safe place. There have been enough times where the drive itself has failed and I was able to recover the system with the complete backup. If you store your backups on the same medium as the original data, I like to see how you get going again in that situation.

K0LO · #14 Post by **K0LO** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 5:31 pm

rkawakami wrote:From my almost 30 years of experience in backing up computer systems, I've never placed the backup copy on the same medium as the original source.

Good advice but there are a few limited circumstances where you might want to do exactly that. For example, think of the recovery partition on ThinkPads. That is a restoration mechanism that stores the backup on the same disk and is done for user convenience. For situations other than a complete failure of the hard disk you can restore Windows or individual files from the recovery environment.

Here's how I use Acronis TrueImage on my ThinkPad while violating the above rule. Instead of the 6 GB IBM recovery partition, I store a complete snapshot of all partitions on my ThinkPad in a 7 GB image file. This image includes the Windows partition, all of my user files, and all of the Linux partitions (well, not the swap partition). Lock, stock and barrel it all fits in a space slightly larger than the recovery partition and can be used in the same manner; that is if you are traveling and your Windows (or Linux) partition gets hosed up you can boot into the Acronis recovery environment and restore one or more partitions from the image file or you can copy individual files out of the image.

I create new images every other week and store one on the laptop's hard disk in a separate partition from the OS and then I copy the image file to an external USB hard disk. The one on the external hard disk is stored in a safe location and is the primary backup. The one on the ThinkPad is for convenience while traveling. I find this solution to be the best of both worlds.

Superego · #15 Post by **Superego** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 12:42 pm

There have been enough times where the drive itself has failed and I was able to recover the system with the complete backup. If you store your backups on the same medium as the original data, I like to see how you get going again in that situation.

I agree. My solution to user convenience is to carry a USB drive that holds a full image of my hard drive. While the probability of a hard drive failing is small, the probability of two failing simultaneously is even smaller. The only problem with this solution is that since I carry the USB drive with my Thinkpad, if both are ever stolen I'm srcewed. So I have third backup on another USB sitting at my desk.

To the OP: Here's another vote for Acronis. It's extremely easy to use, and I like that I can either let Acronis choose backup options for me or I can set them myself (compression, backup validation, passwords, etc.). Also, I have Acronis Disk Director and I can use both in conjunction with a boot disk. That is, I can boot into Acronis and restore backups and repartition if needed.

The only problem I've ever had is that I upgraded Acronis and then tried to restore using an image made pre-update; they're incompatible. I haven't used other imaging software, so I don't know if this is standard. Other than that bump, great piece of software that has saved my butt a few times.

K0LO · #16 Post by **K0LO** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 1:19 pm

Superego:

If you want to carry one less item with you, check out the Guide for creating an Acronis Bootable USB Hard Disk in post #1 in this thread. It describes a procedure for making your external USB hard drive bootable into all of the Acronis utilities; TrueImage, Disk Director, etc. so that you don't need to carry the recovery CD with you.

Acronis claims that you should always be able to restore an old image made with a previous build of their program by using the latest build. Could the "bump" that you encountered have been due to some other cause?

pipspeak · #17 Post by **pipspeak** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 10:53 pm

Thanks all for the comments.

One more question... does Acronis offer the option of incremental file backups... in other words, can it backup only those files that have changed/been added since the last backup from specified folders to an external drive?

Wiz · #18 Post by **Wiz** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 4:18 am

pipspeak wrote:Thanks all for the comments.

One more question... does Acronis offer the option of incremental file backups... in other words, can it backup only those files that have changed/been added since the last backup from specified folders to an external drive?

Yes you can do full, incremental and differential backups using Acronis True Image.

dr_st · #19 Post by **dr_st** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 3:49 am

rkawakami wrote:From my almost 30 years of experience in backing up computer systems, I've never placed the backup copy on the same medium as the original source. . .There have been enough times where the drive itself has failed and I was able to recover the system with the complete backup. If you store your backups on the same medium as the original data, I like to see how you get going again in that situation.

I don't store my backup on the same medium. However, sometimes I backup onto DVDs. I don't like burning a backup set of 6 DVDs on the fly, only to have one of them turn up a coaster, rendering my entire backup set unusable.

For this I prefer to backup my HD onto itself, splitting the archive into DVD-sized files, and then burn them all using Nero or something. This functionality is missing in Ghost (or at least was missing when I last used it, I think version 9).

arni · #20 Post by **arni** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 4:19 am

I have used both R&R in all versions beginning with 3.x to 4.x and it worked very well for backing up the hole harddrive in my thinkpad. I have also done migrations from one harddrive to another without problems. The only point i'm missing with R&R is speed. That's why i switched to TrueImage.

It's more user centric than R&R and it does it's job very, very fast. Currently i'm backing up my Vista partition (about 20GB) in under 12 minutes to a 2nd harddrive stored in the hotbay adapter (both drives are 7200 rpm drives). My userdate is stored on my 2nd drive and backed up automatically once a week to a usb-harddrive with ms-onecare. So far i haven't needed to restore any backups from onecare since Vista's Shadow Copies works very well, too if you just accidentely delete some files.

So if things get messed up i can choose to restore only my data or the hole harddrive (without user data) to the primary disk. Restore with TrueImage goes about in 6 minutes. R&R used nearly 45 min. to 1 hour for the same amount of data.

The only version of TrueImage which had problems restoring older formats was in some of the minor versions of TrueImage 9.x but this bug was corrected by Acronis in about 2-3 weeks with an interim build.

Acronis, Ghost, Retrospect... which backup software?

Acronis, Ghost, Retrospect... which backup software?

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