Acronis alternatives that support NAS and RAID

wolvers · 2 Dec 2010 at 13:13

Hi,

Can anyone point me at some alternatives to Acronis True Image that restore an image from a NAS and has no problems with RAID set ups please? Acronis seems to have issues with these scenarios. I had an image that was written to my NAS no problem but the boot app didn't recognise the NAS and saw the RAID array as separate drives.

It'd be great if anyone knows of a free app that I could use too.

Philtor · 2 Dec 2010 at 13:22

You can get a free trial of Norton Ghost 15.0 link

wolvers · 2 Dec 2010 at 13:30

Thanks Phil. Is it any good? I ran away from Norton products years ago!

Philtor · 2 Dec 2010 at 13:54

lol! Yeah I know what you mean about their other products but Ghost is actually very good

Not entirely sure if it meets all your requirements but sure it's worth a look.

matthab · 2 Dec 2010 at 14:30

Strange Acronis has never had issues restoring my PC's in a RAID config and to and from my file server.

jbloggs · 2 Dec 2010 at 14:34

Macrium Reflect either free or paid for...possibly...

wolvers · 2 Dec 2010 at 15:37

Thanks Mr Bloggs, looks interesting. I'll give it a try out.

I'll need to buy it to get the Windows PE 2.0 Rescue CD with RAID support. It's pricey to do 4 PCs as well.

I've tried out Drive Image XML before I think, but got stuck trying to make a WinPE disc. Anyone got experience of using DI XML?

wolvers · 5 Dec 2010 at 18:49

OK, so all was looking good for Macrium reflect. I was able to get the network drive up in the Linux boot environment but then it fell over when trying to recognise the RAID array. It also saw it as 2 separate drives, just like Acronis.

So, it has an option to add a plugin to BartPE but then says that BartPE is not compatible with Windows7! :rolleyes:

So does that mean that I have to create the BartPE disc in XP and add the plugin, or does it mean that I cannot restore a Windows7 image from a BartPE environment at all? :confused:

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

KIA · 5 Dec 2010 at 21:07

Which RAID controller are you using?

wolvers · 5 Dec 2010 at 21:59

Intel ICH10R, on an X58 board.

wolvers · 7 Dec 2010 at 13:17

OK, so I finally managed to create a BartPE boot disc with the Macrium plugin that will allow me to pull an image from my network drive and recognises my SSD RAID array properly.........but, I say finally because it was not straight forward at all and took a good few hours of downloading the right components and trying out different builds of BartPE.

Putting the right driver files into the build is not a simple process all of the time. The RAID driver for creating a bootable floppy for XP installation was a good source for the that and worked fine, the LAN driver was not so simple. Eventually, I discovered a plugin of LAN drivers that did the job but even then it wasn't straight forward to get the network set up once booted into BartPE. At first it still wouldn't recognise the LAN hardware but after some fiddling around it worked.

So now I have good, free app that creates an image to the network drive in pretty quick time and can be retrieved from the network in a bootable environment.

Although, having said that, I haven't actually tried to restore an image with it yet so that's the next step to make sure that it's in full working order.