Is Acronis TI the only Imaging App with this feature?

Acronis TI allows the user to initiate a restore of the system partition/drive from within Windows (by automatically re-booting itself into Linux). Imho, this is a very handy feature (that is unless your system won't boot into Windows)!

I was just wondering if any other imaging app provides this same feature?

 

As far as I am aware ATI does not boot into Linux. But you are right, this is a handy feature. Please take a look at the flash video in this post. In it you will see that a similar feature exist on the boot screen. I am not sure if this is due to the Drive Snapshot frontend, by inclination is that it is. In that case then, Drive Snapshot with the frontend would also have a feature like the one you are describing.

 

Aaron,

TeraByte have a "Bootfile" which contains all the information for your restore. You can double click it or have it run at 3 AM when you are asleep. Windows shuts down and boots to IFD. The restore runs and the computer restarts into Windows.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/howto-ifd-bootfile.htm

No boot CD is used.

 

Although I prefer DS over ATI, I do have ATI and it does exactly what I said.

DS in itself does not have that feature and as far as I can see, Drive Snap does not provide it for DS.

 

paragon also has a similar feature.
you tell it to restore and it reboots to the "windows blue screen module"
Not to be confused with another blue screen assiciated with windows LOL.

if you have ever used done a boot time defrag with something like perfectdisk or diskeeper you will know what i mean. same with chkdisc.
once its restored it will ask you to press enter to reboot or after around 1minutre or so it will reboot by itself.

always used it on 32bit vista.
but now im using 64bit vista and doesnt work correctly so if i ask it to restore image and check reboot it will then reboot and not do the restore.
then i have to stick in the paragon boot cd and restore the image lol.

sure it will be worked out soon paragon are good at sorting out issues.

 

Gotcha, but IFW/IFD boots into DOS to perform a restore rather than a GUI environment (which ATI does).

 

IFD boots faster and has better hardware support. its easy enough to use. have a go.

 

Into a GUI environment?

 

ye you tell paragon to restore an image using the windows program.
click on apply changes button. it will start and say do you wish to reboot to carry out the procedure. you click yes and it will reboot to show a GUI with the restore process. such as percentage complete,time taken,time remaining and the operation it is doing.

 

Cool ...is that feature found in HDM as well as Drive Backup?

 

Not too sure what you mean here. IFD runs in a GUI. You don't see anything that looks like DOS. Actually it runs in the TeraByte OS, not Microsoft DOS.

I think it's called IFD because image.exe will run in Microsoft DOS but usually it uses its own OS.

 

sure is
its used for anything that needs exclusive disk access. its used in there defrag app to reboot and defrag the drive before windows is fully running.

 

Does it provide for full mouse operations, rather than having to use the arrow keys and/or commands? Not having used IFW/IFD I really don't know.

 

This pathetic image is the best I can do to show a restore.

In the method I described above no manual intervention is needed. Everything is automatic.

This is how IFD looks if you run it manually. No commands are needed. Just up/down keys and Enter.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-dos-ss.htm




..

 

No question that it's very important to be familiar with a bare-metal restore (using a recovery disk), but when Windows is bootable (but perhaps corrupted/infected), it is much more convenient to intiate the restore process from within Windows.

Btw Pete, can SP do that?

Aaron

 

I agree. It's a niche feature but it suits me as I do lots of restores on two computers with good HDs. It will even do an auto restore over a network. As you point out, it's not for HD crashes.

 

We have 3 PCs in our home, mine, my wife's and our son's. I mostly use DS on mine because it's flat-out faster than ATI, but my wife and son find ATI v11 much more user-friendly and because of that they actually do daily backups! My wife and son have both had to restore their system partition a couple of times because of some corruption, where they started the restore process from within Windows and just let it do it's thing (which it did well).

 

It's nice to not have to use a recovery CD and to be able to walk away before Windows shuts down.

You can do this with DS too if you are dual booting or have a small DOS partition.