Best Imaging Software?

what are your opinions when it comes to performance (backup speeds), reliability, and useful feature set of imaging software, name the ones you think apply best to those categories and explain why please.

P.S. only mention ones that are Windows 7 Compatible

 

Here are a few discussions on the topic.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1363562

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1329088

 

If you can get true image to work on your computer, that's the best. Many people have problems, but I never encountered any problems. One thing that it does that I haven't seen in other software (I tried many) is it will allow you to restore a larger partition onto a smaller partition. Also true image has always restored me (not a single corrupt backup). 100 percent success rate is very important for me.

For a while I was using macrium reflect because it was as fast as true image, but I encountered one situation where the restored drive wouldn't bootup. I tried all my troubleshooting tricks which always work, but it wouldn't fix it. It became a coldcase. I went back to true image.

I tried shadowprotect but since it couldn't restore a larger partition into a smaller partition it is worthless to me.

Paragon drivebackup GUI is too confusing to use and it was slower to backup and restore than true image. But paragon drivebackup has a very good bootcd which includes a "boot corrector".

With all imaging software, I only care about the basics backup and restore. The more features in the software, the more chance that it won't work correctly and it will be bloated. I think that is true image downfall all the "extra features" don't work great and it gives it a bad name. The basics work great but it is overlook.

 

I use ShadowProtect and its been rock solid for me for 3 years. It has the fastest back-up and restore speeds for me compared to other programs. I've never had a bad restore or a software crash/freeze. It has many features including incremental backups. It's expensive compared to others, but its been great on my system.

 

is ther an option to ignore the pagefile? and does it work with windows 7?

 

That is why I chose Image for Windows/Image for DOS. I only care about backing up my System Partition. I want to be able to do it simply and reliably. Image for Windows only required a few clicks of the mouse (rather than a lot of confusing options to go through). If you image to DVD(s), the first DVD is always bootable with a choice of "yes" (restore) or "no" (don't restore) at bootup.

This thread helped me with my decision to go with Image for Windows/Image for DOS:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=224570

 

A subjective answer: I've just bought my second license for ShadowProtect. I also have a license for Acronis TI 9. Speed is an important issue for me: ShadowProtect backs up and restores in 7 minutes my XP of 10 GB; Acronis TI 9 does the same amount in 30 minutes. Alas SP is expensive and they give you a discount only if you buy 3 licenses.

 

Shadowprotect works best for me here. Fastest of them all imaging programs and rock solid as well.

 

I recently installed Acronis TI 2010 on Windows 7 64bit.
It works like a charm.
More discussion on TI 2010

To answer your questions:
1. Pagefile and hibernate file are default NOT included.
2. Works fine with W7

 

does shadow protect work on Win7?

 

Within Win7 I don't know. I always backup and restore with the recovery CD. Mind you with ShadowProtect one can only restore a full system with the recovery CD, so it doesn't really matter which OS is being used. For incremental backups and single files or folders they can be restored within the OS, and I can't answer for Win7.

 

Shadow Protect - fast, reliable, no bloatware - but expensive

 

nobody seems to mention paragon, guessing its not a favourite?

 

Ghost 2003 seems to have a bit of strife working on XP with sata drives and doesn't seem to like Vista as well.

Here I install Ghost into an XP install then create several boot floppies which seem to work fine on this quad/sata drives with either XP or Vista installs.

Only one boot floppy is needed but I make a few more for backups.

Nothing like having backups of your backups.

 

dd for Windows.

I've never used anything else and I've never had any problem with it. It always does a sector by sector copy though, which I prefer because I encrypt my system partition. Make sure to increase the block size from the default (I usually do around 20 MB).

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd


p.s. (from Wikipedia) It is jokingly said to stand for "data destroyer" or "delete data", since, being used for low-level operations on hard disks, a small mistake, such as reversing the if and of parameters, can possibly result in the loss of all or some data on a disk.

Make sure to get the "if" and "of" correct.

 

My own personal favourite is Macrium Reflect,it's fast,good compression,easy to use and most importantly I've never had a bad image restoration.

 

Here's another good link.

Especially, see Post #7. It has some information on speeds.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=220553

 

does Image for Windows fully support win7 yet?

 

Yes, all the TeraByte imaging products do. Including BING. BING also supports 2048 sector-aligned partitions.

BING can easily fix the problem where Dell computer users with Vista try to fix the fictitious errors reported by Partition Magic. No more booting Vista after using PM.

 

Osaban,

Don't you trust a SP backup in Windows?

It seems a terrible waste of someone's time when they have to shutdown their computer and manually do a backup. Even manual backups in Windows are a time waster when the backup could have been done automatically.

 

My vote goes to Drive Snapshot (surprised it hasn't already been mentioned)...

Why? - because it's very small, portable, fast and 100% reliable!!!

 

I trust SP backups in windows completely - automated and manual. Never had a problem. I agree it would be a pain to have to reboot using cd. I'd probably forget to do it and not have a current backup when I need it most.

 

I have SP scheduled to backup two times diary. I have restored the image two times without any problem. The backup process is very fast, 3 ou 4 times faster than ATI 9 and 10.

 

I wish I could still use SP. Tried 3.3 CD running backup and restore of system partition on my Vista Thinkpad T400 and still got dreaded Windows repair loop on startup. Wish I could get thaat problem solved but so far no go on my system.

Otherwise, SP is solid on my wife's Sony laptop as well as on all other machines I have used it on in the past.

Gary