Ho do you benchmark different backup softwares?

I'd like to do some benchmark tests on various different disk imaging software, for my website [link in sig], however I've never needed to restore a hard drive, a few times I've cloned drives, and although had a few bad sectors, I've managed to get away with a working cloned drive without any major issues [thank goodness].

There seems to be so many good imaging software available Acronis True Image, Paragon Drive image, Norton Ghost, to name a few. My samsung netbook even comes with a cmos based backup software that loads up in boot and I've mad a "succcessful" backup from it a few times, although truth be told making an image is only scratching the surface. The real test is when you try to restore a backup, that's why you know whether a backup has worked or not.

Is there any easy way to test the imaging software with just a desktop machine? I don't really have a huge $10K+ computer rig that I can use to run these tests.

 

It depends on which market's product(s) and features you would like to test, for example, home product and commerical product.

Basically, you can just test on your desktop(home users products), but the result can only reflect your hardware environment only or similar environment.


Some disk backup/imaging softwares have hardware independant restore function, like Acronis Universal Restore, Paragon P2P and so on.
So if you want to test these functions, you may need a computer with different hardwares, like CPU, motherbroad, display card......

Also, you should consider which OS you want like to use for your test. As Windows 7 has more integrated drivers, especially, AHCI drivers, which Windows XP did not integrated.

Of course there are other things you need to consider too.
You should list or point out the method that you used for testing, like backup from a BootCD(DOS version? Linux-based? or WinPE(which version?)-Based?) or on the real system. And others....

-RAID HDD/SSD or not?
-Full, Incremental or differencial backup/imaging?
-etc.......

Hope this can help you!

If there are mistakes, please feel free to tell me!

 

Here is the way I do it on my desktop.

-First I defrag my OS hd and format my second internal hd and create offline images with a sector based image application of both the OS drive and the second drive.
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- Then I install the image app and take a full hot image of the OS to the second drive.(and take a note of the time and size that was needed).
- After that I copy to the OS drive a folder (named e.g. "A") with various files of 1gb total size. and take an incremental image and a differential (again take note of the times and sizes).
- Copy another folder (B) with 1gb total size and create a second incremental (take note again of the time needed and the size of the incremental).
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- Then I restore the images; 1 full, 1 differential and 2 incrementals and take notes of the times needed.
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- At the end I restore the images of the OS hd and the second hd (from the first step), and repeat the above steps for the second, third, etc. imaging app.

Panagiotis