Comparing ATI to Symantec Ghost - Simple Plan Not Working

I am a long time Corporate Symantec Ghost user. I came across ATI one day and really liked the modern feel and interface. It is a far cry from having to make a Win98 boot disk and hope Ghost sees all of the drives, does not corrupt the image, and does not ask for a 3rd set of a spanned image that does not exist.

Anyway, for my first real use of ATI I built a WinXP workstation, installed ATI (v10.0), and went to create bootable media. Right there is where I ran into problems. My XP image will be about 2G compressed so I had planned on creating a bootable DVD, sysprepping the image, rebooting, booting off of the DVD into ATI then imaging the HD to the DVD. This plan was relatively straight forward, or so I thought.

It is 3hrs later and I am almost ready to go back to Ghost. Below is a list of problems:

1. Acronis would not burn the bootable image to the DVD. After a couple of failures, I gave up, wrote an ISO and burned the ISO to the DVD using Nero.

2. After booting off the DVD, not only could I not burn directly to the DVD, ATI did not even see my DVD drive. So I can only assume that once I do finally get the image onto the DVD, ATI will not allow me to restore from the DVD since it does not see it.

3. Since ATI does not see my DVD drive, it does not give me an option to save to it, so I will have to install a second HD in the system, boot from the bootable DVD, image the system disk to an archive folder on the second HD, then use Nero to burn the *.tib file as a second session on the bootable DVD and hope ATI sees it when I'm done.

Needless to say, Ghost with all its faults, is nowhere near as painful as this. With Ghost all I would need to do is make a Win98 bootable floppy, add Ghost to it, boot off the floppy, then image the HD to the DVD. During the image process Ghost would let me add the bootable floppy to the DVD image.

Below is some additional system information:

ATI Version: 10.0 (Not sure of the build number the image is sysprepped I do not want to re-open it).
DVD Drive: Memorex DVD+/-DLRWL16 D2
Workstation: Dell GX260
DVD Media: Verbatim DVD+R

Notes: All I am trying to do is create emergency rescue media for the individuals that I am shipping this system to so that if the HD dies, it gets a virus, etc, they can quickly restore it to the point it was at when I shipped it to them. I do not need anything any fancier than an emergency restore DVD. It is looking like Ghost might be the answer.

 

Many before you went through the hassles with "not compatible "and "not recognized " with ATI, i went through the painfull experience myself , eventually Shadow Protect from Storage Craft came to the rescue.But i will say,peruse thru the threads on this forum about Shadow Protect and make your own conclusions..........you will be relieved !!!

 

Hello,
i went through problems with ATI a while back.
i surgest trying eiether shadow protect desktop or paragon.
both have worked great for me.
lodore

 

Long time Ghost 2003 user here which worked no probs on all of my "ide" drive systems, imaging/restoring through it's windows gui.

Running ghost through windows for sata drives was sorta half successful in that with the -noide switch I could make an image but would lock up at trying to boot back into windows.

I could get out of this prob by having a copy of ghreboot.exe command on a win 98 boot floppy which forced ghost reboot back to windows.

Decided to try a ghost boot floppy and it works like a charm on all of my ide/sata/XP/Vista setups.

Paragon seemed ok but I just trust imaging from dos where nothing is active more so than hot imaging.

 

ATI and DVD's ? That is begging for problems.
You are better of with "ShadowProtect Desktop v3" and an external harddisk.
Don't buy your external harddisk too small, having extra elbowroom is always handy.
DVD is for music, photos, movies, ... or second backup of data, but not as main backup of data.
Using Verbatim is good.

ShadowProtect is the Rolls Royce and Ferrari of the image backup softwares, the price too.

 

What program would one suggest for a beginner? ATI, ShadowProtect or DriveClone 3 Pro?

Thanks
zach

 

Hello,
The answer is very subjective. People will tell you to use what they use.
In my case, I am using ATI and it works great.
Mrk

 

Yep bad experience with ATI, I was able to create image back up, but when time to do a restore ATI would not recognize that my partitions existed. So not able to restore anything with no partitions to do restore in. Ghost 2003 works for me. I have used it on several Dell desktops, HP desktops, Sony Vaios, Toshiba Satellites', Emachines, and other various laptops no problems at all, all the machines had XPproS2 on them not VISTA......

 

Even simpler than Ghost is TeraByte software. All your clients need do is boot to the DVD that you supply and press Y. That's it. No menus. No choices apart from Y or N. The partition will be restored if they press Y.

 

Its good but far behind in speed as compared with SP 2+3

 

Huupi,

Can SP do what diesel5599 requires? I don't know as I haven't tried it. The issue isn't "what is your favourite software".

 

ShadowProtect is the most userfriendly one and has lesser screens than ATI for the daily jobs, although ATI is also userfriendly.
SP has only one big disadvantage : activation required, but that has nothing to do with the quality of SP.

 

Peter2150,

I agree and it's even slower if you restore from a DVD. But all image/restore procedures with DVDs are slow. I don't use DVDs at all for this purpose. However for diesel5599's purpose it sounds good. He would be supplying a bootable DVD to someone with presumably no knowledge of image/restore software. In the event of an OS disaster all they have to do is boot to the DVD and press Y. Remember, it will be a basic image on the DVD so the restore won't take much longer than 10 minutes. An inexperienced user will see this as warp speed compared with reinstalling Windows and his/her programs.

You and I wouldn't do this. We have other more sophisticated techniques.

 

We are both talking about IFD. I didn't state that clearly in Post #10.