Ghost 9.0 and Acronis True Image?

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by Wills, Apr 17, 2005.

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  1. Wills

    Wills Registered Member

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    Location:
    Canada
    i am presently considering the purchase of a western digital 160 gig external usb hard drive.
    it comes with the program Retrospect by Dantz which I understand to be simply a back up program for data files and hence I will have to purchase either Ghost 9.0 or ATI.

    I presently have the Norton Professional Systemworks 2003 which I have been updating by subscription, however, the New Ghost 9.0 has password protection with it and I understand ATI does as well.

    I want to have this protection on the hard drive for my image since I would feel very insecure about the HD getting stolen.

    I was told by a colleague that before I purchase the new version of Norton Professional Systemworks Premiere 2005 that I should inquire into the differences between the New Ghost Program and ATI which I understand to be a very good product.

    My old Ghost program I had to boot the hard drive to get at my Ghost Image which apparently the new one it is not necessary to do this.

    I am anxious to get some feedback on the ATI as I intend to purchase the Hard Drive as soon as I get the information on what is the best program to look at....Ghost 9.0 or ATI.

    I also need something extremely user friendly that I can do incremental changes to my image.
    With my old Ghost program I had to take my notebook to the Tech who charged me $100 per every 3 months that I ghosted.
    My toshiba notebook is xp "OS", 40 gigs, intel pentium 4, 512 RAM and 1.9 GHZ and has a lot of work sensitive programs and files and configurations on it as well as settings and isp settings for the various locations that I go to when I am out in the field and thus I want to purchase a program that is very user friendly.

    I look forward to hearing from someone in respect of the above questions.

    I should say that I have noticed some posts with members that seem to be having problems with their Western Digital Hard Drive being recognized etc.
    How does this impact on the product decision that I am about to make on the Hard Drive that I am looking ato_O?

    Thankyou in advance, I hope that I have not asked too many confusing questions in this post.

    Respectful Regards
     
  2. S?ul

    S?ul Registered Member

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    Since I'm just a novice user I can't answer your technical questions, but I can offer you a couple links to some Non-Biased reviews on both programs. I hope they are somewhat helpful.

    At this review site for TI8 people either hate it of love it. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground here. Acronis True Image 8

    At the same review site as above the user ratings are very low for the new Ghost. Norton Ghost 9.0

    Good luck with your decision,
    Søul
     
  3. MiniMax

    MiniMax Registered Member

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    Hello Wills,

    True Image should be able to do what you are looking for, but depending on your hardware (motherboard, USB controller, USB controller in the external HD enclosure, etc), you might encounter problems if you ever need to recover from a hard disk crash.

    I suggest that you simply download the trial version of True Image and test it. It is not a demo - it is a time limited trial version so you can really see and test how it works for you.

    Re: Dantz Retrospect - I have an external Maxtor HD (on Firewire) which came with Retrospect. I have not tested it so I can not be sure, but with a little extra work, the backups it create can be used to re-build not only your data files, but also a the operating system. But an imaging program is much simpler - when it works. As an illustration, read this little tale about how a standard Windows NTBackup allowed me to rebuild a dead system.
     
  4. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    NSW, Australia
    Both are good, I prefer Ghost 9. I've never had any problems imaging or restoring from either application. Guess I'm lucky.

    As mentioned above, you need to make sure TI works on your system. It seems to be very hardware specific.

    Here is the link to the Ghost Forum http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi

    Brian
     
  5. iflyprivate

    iflyprivate Registered Member

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    Posts:
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    I own a Toshiba MK35 laptop and also a Dell 5160 laptop (XP Pro). I also own both Ghost 9 and Acronis TrueImage 8.

    Ghost is a mess. It has a lousy manual, no support forum like this one and Symantec never responds to tech questions without bureaucratic email exchanges. Besides, it WILL NOT do what you outlined you want to do.

    TrueImage8 DOES do what you want to do. I do it all the time. And, it's a simple affair for those of us who are non-technical.

    I create images of my internal hard drives and store them on my external USB2 hard drive which I assembled myself. It has a plain old Hitachi 60GB 5400 rpm mechanism mounted in a CompUSA $19.95 USB2 2.5" enclosure and it works perfectly for restoring from or saving to regardless of all the horror stories posted here. There's nothing special about a Western Digital hard drive as long as it works so you should have no difficulty using it.

    I have never had a corrupted image nor have I ever had a problem restoring an image from the external hard drive. I have had some difficulty "cloning" my hard drive but I found a very easy workaround which is goof-proof. I use my Acronis Recovery CD for 100% reliability when cloning.

    As for Ghost 9, I don't ever bother using it anymore. It never worked in creating an image of the entire hard drive and restoring it. It only allowed creating and restoring partitions which isn't good enough. However, Symantec did pack an extra CD named Ghost 2003 which supposedly would image and restore the entire hard drive BUT it requires you to boot to DOS and work in the black screen environment. To hell with that stuff! I bought TrueImage8 and never looked back.

    Unless you have something wrong with your hardware or your hard drive has corrupted software on it, you should have zero difficulty creating your images and restoring them - all within a very simple graphical environment.
     
  6. Wills

    Wills Registered Member

    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2004
    Posts:
    146
    Location:
    Canada
    I see that the comments indicate that ATI is pretty Hardware specific, does anyone use a Western Digital external usb 160 hard drive?
    And what are the results.

    My colleague has the Ghost 9.0 and is happy with it especially the password option for the Hard Drive. he has not encountered problems.

    i know that my older version of Ghost that came with my Professional systemworks is supposed to be a better program ( the 2003 Norton Professional System Works ) however it is not user friendly for me and it does not have password protection for the external hard drive and also has that boot aspect that I really detest.

    This Acronis is very new to me, my tech neighbour still says he prefers Ghost and its ease of application so that is why I am kind of confused.

    I know Ghost uses Partitions does Acronis? Or is that an option?

    Again is it user friendly for a person who is between Novice and Intermediate and does it have a good manual?
    I know that my original Ghost 2003 that came with Systemworks 2003 had a very poor manual.
    Also, the Ghost 9.0 are all on sale up here in Canada so I was wondering if anyone has heard whether there is a new version coming out?
     
  7. napoleon

    napoleon Registered Member

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    This is one of those "you can debate this until the cows come home" situations. The bottom line is, for every Acronis supporter you will find a Ghost supporter. This reminds me of the old Chevy vs. Ford discussions I had in my youth. :) Anyway, as someone else has recommended, download and try the demo version. Opinions aside, this is the only true way to understand if it's best for you. Personally, I love TI8. I have used Symantec Ghost and its corportate version, LiveState, for many years and it has let me down at every turn. We recently moved to TI and we love it. Good luck!
     
  8. Detox

    Detox Retired Moderator

    Joined:
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    Posts:
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    Location:
    Texas, USA
    Hi everyone - I have moved this thread over here to "software and services" as this is a software comparison discussion and the Acronis forum is for support issues.
     
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