Acronis True Image any good?

UKMEDIASTORE · 16 Jan 2012 at 19:02

Grenache said:
You can also use the Microsoft Sysinternals utility Disk2VHD, which is free and easy to use - just tick which drive you want to copy to a VHD and click ok.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415

I cannot use this as I have a full OEM edition windows 7.

Says this at the bottom of the linked page

Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 installed by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) using OEM versions of these products may not be transferred to a virtual hard drive in accordance with Microsoft licensing terms.

MoRT489 · 17 Jan 2012 at 09:18

UKMEDIASTORE said:
Just installed Acronis & done 1st back-up it done it in less than 4 mins! is that always that quick?

Let us know how it is for reformatting the drive with the same image (if you dare

).

Beasty · 17 Jan 2012 at 09:33

I use it to make images of the laptops we have at work, saves me a lot of time but that's on xp where there's no equivalent.

deadite66 · 17 Jan 2012 at 09:37

just timed mine:
4m30s to image 60GB SSD.
2m20s to verify.

bledd · 17 Jan 2012 at 09:57

kirkster said:
I don't like backup SW - period. I'd rather just drag and drop my documents onto my NAS drive and rebuild the machine and applications and drag the data back. I just don't trust the backup SW - any issues with it and your precious memories are toast.

My 2 penneth...

KS

I'm a fan of using robocopy to backup data folders from one place to another. But it's always good to have a system image backup for a rainy day.

I use Macrium Reflect (paid version) for this

MoRT489 · 17 Jan 2012 at 11:49

deadite66 said:
just timed mine:
4m30s to image 60GB SSD.
2m20s to verify.

And how long to restore windows from the image after a format?

deadite66 · 17 Jan 2012 at 11:52

never timed that it was mid last year when i had to restore.

Antar Bolaeisk · 17 Jan 2012 at 12:04

mrk said:
Windows System Image Backups are unique in that it creates a VHD, I don't know if many people understand what this means but you can browse the contents as a drive from any PC so your data is always there or you can move it to another location like a NAS or whatever. Restoring it restores the drive that it was created from 1:1.

Whether you like backup software or not, it's not exactly hard to check if a backup completed properly and with System Images it serves several functions all in one. It is the most logical way to back up. To back up my 60 odd GB of SSD data it takes about 30mins so it's also a fast affair.

Acronis can convert it's backups to VHD and it also has a restore to different hardware feature which sounds like it might be useful (although I've never used it).

MoRT489 · 17 Jan 2012 at 12:33

bledd. said:
I'm a fan of using robocopy to backup data folders from one place to another. But it's always good to have a system image backup for a rainy day.

I use Macrium Reflect (paid version) for this

Is there any benefit for an ordinary home user to choose Macrium Reflect paid version or Acronis True Image over the Macrium Reflect free version?

CaptainCrash · 17 Jan 2012 at 12:51

creed said:
Is there any benefit for an ordinary home user to choose Macrium Reflect paid version or Acronis True Image over the Macrium Reflect free version?

It depends what you want to do, there's a feature comparison table here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

I'd say "probably not" if you have an alternative backup solution (eg Robocopy) for your user data, but the ability to do incremental backups of a system image might be handy in some circumstances.

matthab · 17 Jan 2012 at 13:04

I use Acronis. I will say the early versions were horrible and clunky. Now the new version 2012 is fast and reliable. I backup every night with it and it takes about 10minutes if Ive not put much new stuff on.

Id recommend you give the 30 days trial ago. They had some good deals going on before Christmas.