best, Drive image or True Image 8?

[tobamore]

Hello, I have been using drive image 7 for a while, but I'm considering a change to true image (based on people rating it). My question is, how do these 2 programs compare? Is TI8 more reliable/user friendly/quicker? What are the benefits?

mtia,

T.

[mareke]

Drive Image is Norton Ghost before it was taken over by Symantec. I like Acronis for its ease of use and speed. Having tried Ghost it has more of an old fashioned feel about it booting into a DOS environment whereas Acronis has a modern graphical interface that makes it almost childs play to use. If both worked on my computer (Ghost does not and therefore almost certainly Drive Image does not) I would choose Acronis because of its graphical interface, ease of use and features.

[Zintar]

I'm still using an old Ghost for my older systems. I looked at DI7 and TI7 for the newer systems recently. (At that time, the newer Ghost had a lot of issues including known issues with the new hardware I was planning.) I preferred TI over DI for a number of reasons.

MUCH smaller footprint. (Both disk and RAM.)
Better/Simpler GUI. (Easy enough for my parents PCs as well as my own.)
Faster.
Smoother disaster recovery. (Quicker to boot, all memory resident - swap media whenever you like etc.)
Far fewer compatibility/crash complaints – every program has some but TI at the time appeared to have far fewer relative to the number of users. (Which is difficult to estimate I grant.)

As I mentioned in another thread, I tried the DVD writing which I felt was rather heavily advertised in DI 7 but I felt let down. It was a packet writing system (kind of understandable but still annoying) and I was amazed at how slow it was. I could image to disk and then burn the images with Nero (no packet writing!) all in a fraction of the time that DI7 would take to write straight to the same DVD drive. I was planning to use USB hard drives anyway but I was annoyed that a heavily advertised feature performed so poorly. Checking forums I found many other posts from people with the same issue. Direct writing of DVDs was the only advertised feature that seemed unique to DI so it was quite a letdown when it turned out to be such a dud for me.

All that said, if you've got a system that is working well for you, I'd keep it. At least until you have some new hardware that forces an upgrade.

[sandokan]

Neither Drive Image (now in the dubious hands of Symantec), nor Norton Ghost could ever boot to DOS (unless one is using an obsolete OS such as the 9x family). I have used DI 6 for a long time, and it boots to Caldera DOS, which is an emulation of DOS, as there is no underlying DOS in NT based OSs. Sadly DI 6 (DI7 I found it to be quite poor and a behemoth on top) doesn't support SATA drives at all, as I had to learn the hard way, so I moved to ATI. I never use the imaging in Windows, and neither do I care for the Zone (Secure or Safe, whatever), since I do have 2 physical HDDs, so I simply reboot my box with the bootable CD and image my system drive to my storage drive. I find it very easy and convenient, but then again, so was DI 6 until SATA drives made it useless.