Acronis True Image

peterattheboro

peterattheboro

peterattheboro

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Hello.

Well after about 6 hours of faffing on with a new installation of Vista on some dodgy drives which 'don't meet the criteria' I have decided to create an image of a now fully working and clean version of Vista (LOL just had a lockup when installing Acronis and CACKED myself! :p)

Is this just a case of save the image on another hard drive, boot from an acronis disk and copy the image over to C: and away you go?
 
Acronis can be a lifesaver. I messed up my display driver and just had a haze on the screen - a total wreck.
Just slip in the Acronis boot disk (created on installation) and recovered the OS with all the drivers.
I do have a partitioned hard drive and I reserve C: for Windows. This keeps the Acronis backups smaller (about 7.5GB for a complete XP SP3 disk) and restoring doesn't touch my data.
With selective restore if I'd known what files/folders I'd wrecked I could just have restored those.
It's worth every penny. I'd recommend the 'retail' version (sold by Overclockers) rather than the download, as you get the (bootable) CD and a useful little manual which helps if your display is unreadable!
 
vince said:
Acronis can be a lifesaver. I messed up my display driver and just had a haze on the screen - a total wreck.
Just slip in the Acronis boot disk (created on installation) and recovered the OS with all the drivers.
I do have a partitioned hard drive and I reserve C: for Windows. This keeps the Acronis backups smaller (about 7.5GB for a complete XP SP3 disk) and restoring doesn't touch my data.
With selective restore if I'd known what files/folders I'd wrecked I could just have restored those.
It's worth every penny. I'd recommend the 'retail' version (sold by Overclockers) rather than the download, as you get the (bootable) CD and a useful little manual which helps if your display is unreadable!
Click to expand...

it's more like 600mb for xp sp3

also, with the downloadable one, you can create an iso, and always get the latest version.
 
I tried True Image a few months ago and made an image. Now when I restore the image (Vista x64) which I did to test it, it doesn't boot. You have to put the Vista CD in and click repair first. Annoying as hell but I don't frequently do this.

Back to Ghost for me!



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
I tried True Image a few months ago and made an image. Now when I restore the image (Vista x64) which I did to test it, it doesn't boot. You have to put the Vista CD in and click repair first. Annoying as hell but I don't frequently do this.

Back to Ghost for me!
M.
Click to expand...
I've heard exactly the same for Ghost!
 
I use it, but specifically just so I have an image of my drive I can access to pull my old files off should I need to reinstall.

That said I'll probably keep a bootable disk about just in case.
 
I currently use Acronis to manage backups of the 300+ PC's I have to look after in work
It is in my opinion the best backup software around , easy to use and very configurable.
 
bledd. said:
it's more like 600mb for xp sp3
Click to expand...
I should have mentioned that C: on my machine also contains all the preloaded software the PC came with. I forgot all about that :o

also, with the downloadable one, you can create an iso, and always get the latest version.
Click to expand...
It would be worth checking the Download price. Overclockers retail package seemed very reasonable
 
Credo said:
I've heard exactly the same for Ghost!
Click to expand...

Depends which version of Ghost.

If you are using the Windows one (i.e. home user) I wouldn't bother.

If you're using the corporate one - two floppies is all you require (if you want to back up onto CD / DVD) or one if you want to back up on to another HD / to the network / another partition.

Can't beat it for speed either - 17GB C:\ Partition backed up to another partition (size 7GB recovery time <10 minutes) where as with TI it took around 40 minutes and the compression wasn't great - around 13GB.



M.
 
I was looking on an Acronis forum, and they were complaing about Vista problems.

Are there any know "no no's" for XP as it seems a good product?
 
m4cc45 said:
I tried True Image a few months ago and made an image. Now when I restore the image (Vista x64) which I did to test it, it doesn't boot. You have to put the Vista CD in and click repair first. Annoying as hell but I don't frequently do this.

Back to Ghost for me!

M.
Click to expand...
Did you perhaps choose to restore the Master Boot record as well as the main part of the image? I'm not saying this is the cause, but I've restored 3 times (with XP) and always omitted the MBR as I've known it's OK.

Vista may be different...
 
One thing with Acronis (for the corporate users) is that encryption is built in, with Ghost you have to faff around and try and get drivers on the ghost boot disk before an (encrypted) image can be deployed

The other good thing about Acronis is that you can actually create an image while still using the pc - Im not sure this is possible with Ghost (although I havent used the very latest version)

(I am talking about Echo Workstation version of Acronis)

Also Acronis do a version which can theoretically apply a working image to a different set of hardware, which can be useful when HP and the like continue to change their componants every couple of months
 
You can do an image whilst using the PC though why you would want to is beyond me as it kills it. I think the main thing for ghost is really good compression and really quick you can deploy an image to 200 machines (a 15GB uncompressed image) in around 8 minutes.

I did try the MBR though surely this should be on by default? Don't get me wrong it was no hardship just a pain in the proverbial when I found out.



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
You can do an image whilst using the PC though why you would want to is beyond me as it kills it. I think the main thing for ghost is really good compression and really quick you can deploy an image to 200 machines (a 15GB uncompressed image) in around 8 minutes.

I did try the MBR though surely this should be on by default? Don't get me wrong it was no hardship just a pain in the proverbial when I found out.



M.
Click to expand...

In a corporate arena the machines are usually in use - so unless you want to hang around until 8pm or before 7am , you want to create images while pc's are in use

Acronis has varying amounts of CPU power etc it uses so you can choose how much the actual user feels the effect
 
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