Dynamic drive hell!

Somehow I have several drives that were converted to dynamic drives and aren't being backed up by Acronis 10. I understand that Acronis "home" doesn't support dynamic drives.

Does any Acronis imaging product support dynamic drives??

Is there any way to get back to a basic drive without deleing the drive partitions??

Help! I need to back up!

bert

 

Hope this helps.

Mark

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044

 

Not what I wanted to hear
I should have mentioned I'm running Vista (ultimate) and I really don't want to delete volumes (I realize I may have no choice if I can't image these dynamic drives).

I can't seem to find any docs that indicate if any of the Acronis products will image a dynamic drive (it appears that Ghost 14 does).

bert

 

Here's a little info from Acronis.

Mark

http://www.acronis.com/resource/solutions/backup/2005/dynamic-disks.html

 

That was REALLY not what I wanted to hear! $999 for a license! Problem is, dynamic disks aren't only on servers. I'm going to check out Ghost 14 - the web site says it backs up dynamic disks - for $69.

Thanks,
Bert

 

Bert,

From page 21 in Ghost 14 userguide.

 

Now that IS something I needed to hear!

THanks,
Bert

 

Just a thought, but maybe there are some free alternatives out there. I haven't tried any but it may be worth checking out.

Mark

 

ATI Workstation supports dynamic drives, and it's $80 ($48 if upgrading from ATI Home). It's MUCH better than Norton Ghost.

 

I assume that's their "Echo" Workstation - do you use it? I had used Ghost before I went to ATI Home and miss the better scheduling that Ghost has - what about Echo Workstation do you like better than Ghost?

bert

 

My understanding is that ATI Echo ($80) will back up and restore dynamic volumes (as opposed to disks), which makes sense, if you think about it the way dynamic volumes work.

 

What really irks me about ATI Home (and maybe all Acronis products) is that my backup was failing for a month now and there was NO indication that the backup failed! No Event log entry, No Acronis log entry - NOTHING!

It wasn't until I needed to restore a single file that I realized only one volume out of 4 was being backed up.

There should have been SOME indication of the failure, but there wasn't.

bert

 

I have just started using Echo Workstation, which is the only current Workstation product. As for what I like better in ATI: Reliability, user interface, and tech support - in that order. The feature set is pretty similar at this point. It's true that Acronis has their own set of reliability issues, as some of the previous posts attest. But I personally have not run into any of them, and overall, users seem to have much more trouble with Norton. I recommend scanning through the reviews at Amazon for the two products to get a feel for what I'm talking about. (Amazon sells only the Home version of ATI, but it's close enough to be relevant.)

 

I haven't used Echo Workstation, but have used Acronis 9, 10 and 11 TI Home. I now have Ghost 14 and can compare the two.

Here's what I like about both:

=====================================================
ATI Home:
==================
I like the differential backups and it seems to work for me. I've restored on several occassions sucessfully and that's the proof of the pudding for me.

What I don't like is their support - I have had little luck with it. Maybe the Echo Workstation support is better - but the support for ATI Home is practically non-existant.

I don't like the network backup - I don't have a complicated network and have standard NIC cards but I have never been able to backup over the network and Acronis has been NO help. Many others seem to have this same problem.

I don't like the requirement that I have to write convoluted batch files to delete backkp sets. I like to maintain 2 historical backups - there is no facility with the "home" version to do this.

I REALLY don't like the fact that for over a month my backups were failing with NO indication - no event log entry, no Acronis log entry (it indicated sucess), no notification.


==================
Ghost 14:
==================
I originally left Ghost (2 or 3 versions ago) because of bad support - only to find Acronis's support is worse. I had an occassion to "chat" with Symantec support (India) last night and they were actually helpful - not something I experience very often.

With Ghost you can define a number of backup sets and it will delete the oldest and maintain the # of backup sets you request. This is important to me.

Ghost now does an "offsite" copy. I use 2 external firewire drives and typically backup to both. The "offsite" copy now will copy a backup set to whatever local drive, network drive, FTP site, etc you want thus creating a 2nd copy - something I really like.

Ghost does dynamic drives. ATI Home doesn't, although I understand that Echo Workstation does.

Ghost has no problem doing network backups, at least on my network.

=====================================================

Somebody pointed out this thread about the two. Based on it, I realize how easy it will be to use Ghost to convert back to a "Basic" drive:
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/Ya...num=1207636711

bert