what are the best alternatives to Acronis True Image?

I came to this forum under the same circumstances as you: realizing Acronis is simply a ripoff.

Paragon Drive Backup works perfectly as claimed and intended. It is a no-brainer because you can download a free trial, and immediately create and restore some images to give you confidence. It has saved me many times already.

 

A good guide to making a decision

here

 

Interesting link. I think I will give it a try. I have had Trueimage 8,10 and 11. For me version 8 was the best and then it got downhill. I don't need all the extra stuff, just an image of my system drive.

 

Yes, this Feb08 PC Magazine article (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2259168,00.asp) likes Shadow Protect...describes it as the only drive imager that won't frighten the nontechnical user...that would be me.

I recently bought Acronis True Image Home 11 (BestBuy ~$40) and am learning (with lots of help from these forums) about backup in general and using this Acronis specificly. The first thing you do is download the latest build which may have resolved some if not all problems mentioned above.

 

Here
http://www.drive-backup.com/glossary/boot_corrector.htm
is Paragon's description of their boot corrector.

 

ShadowProtect rated Editors Choice by PcMag

I've had fairly good success with TrueImage for the most part. I restore files all the time with no problems. However, I did try to to restore a whole system and it wouldn't do it b/c there were errors on the boot sector. (That was my fault, but it woudl have been nice if TI had let me know while it was making those backups.)


However, it does have some annoyances like it's poor post-backup command functionality (anything you run won't throw up a dialog box... which means I can't have shutdown routine that throws up a dialog saying "shutting down in 5 minutes.. click CANCEL to cancel this shutdown"

I've not tried ShadowProtect, but it won a PC Editor's choice:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2254465,00.asp

 

Another happy user of Paragon Drive Backup (works well and is significantly cheaper). Also, v9 is supposed to be on the way soon (whatever that means).

 

where did you hear the version 9 is suppoosed to be on the way soon?

 

Dom,

Based on some interesting test results by Jo Ann that were essentially confirmed by nexstar in this thread (as well as it being chosen 'editor's choice' by PC Mag), I suggest you give strong consideration to ShadowProtect.

The only caveat is that you need to make sure that SP's Recovery Boot CD recognizes all of your hard drives (it didn't see my PC's HDDs)!

 

I have Acronis TI 9 on one machine with XP, and it has always restored flawlessly when required (I did not upgrade to newer versions because I didn't want to pay for it). Acronis 'snapman driver' has been causing quite a number of conflicts with other applications.

I bought ShadowProtect for my new computer running Vista, and had 2 FAST restorations (6. 30 minutes) for 16 GB of stuff. I trust the company as I've been running ShadowUser with XP for 3 years without a single glitch. They are very professional and matter-of-factly. The only thing I'm not so happy about is their activation policy and their limited number of downloads which should minimize piracy.

 

lodore,

I read it a couple of weeks ago in their community forums (a post from a paragon employee). I do not, however, remember exactly where it was.

 

Boot corrector info

When backing up and restoring windows2000/server2003 or windows xp. If everything goes fine with no hardware problems and you restore successfully to a new hard drive but the new hard drive won't boot.

What to do? you have a hard drive that won't boot up. Most people will redo the clone or backup, try the fixmbr/fixboot, repair installations, get a new hard drive with no success.

Usually the boot.ini file or system drive letter changes will cause a non-boot. Those problems can only be fixed by manually editing the registry on the non-booting hard drive. This is where the "boot corrector" comes in. It's a boot cd that will boot up the computer and allow you to read and change the boot.ini and drive letters. I've used it several times to get a restored drive to bootup. It has yet to fail me. That's why I'm confident in using true image 9.0 for my backups and restorations. As long as I have a "boot corrector" I can restore true image everytime. Without a "boot corrector", I would also be here looking for an alternative imaging software. When using true image by itself, my success rate was 50 percent which to me is unacceptable.

I've read some of the other image software forums and found drive letter problems on all of them, even shadowprotect. Thats a problem that is found only when backing up and restoring nt base systems, it doesn't matter what software you use. All it takes is for you to miss a step somewhere along the backup or restore process.

I wouldn't attempt to restore an xp partition, unless I had a "boot corrector" nearby. It's the difference between a 5 minute fix or spending hours troubleshooting.

The latest version of boot corrector is found in "paragon partition manager version 9.0", that's the only one that works with the latest hardware. I bought the partition manager just to have the latest version of the "boot corrector". For me it was a better purchase than to upgrade to the latest version of true image.

Theres a demo available of an older version of the "boot corrector" but it doesn't work on all of the newest hardware.
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/JustBoot_Boot_Corrector_38938_p/

 

thanks seem to have found it roughly. its ment to have incremental image support and come out summer 2008.hopefully creating images will be faster.

 

Imho PC Magazine ignored one of the most important factors in deciding among the various disk-imagers and that is if their Emergency Boot CD recognizes all of your hard drives (internal and external).

While fast backups/restores, fancy GUI's and other 'bells and whistles' are nice, the Emergency Boot CD is vital for disaster recovery. So you want to make sure it recognizes your hard drives before buying the product - appster's post above is an example of this potential issue!

 

I have been using DriveImage XML by Runtime Software for several years and never had a failure.

I have tried Ghost and Acronis and had restoration failures on images that were supposedly sound. Ghost was good for me up to Ghost 2003 and after that, restoration was iffy.

The only downside to DriveImage XML is that there is no boot disk. You must make your own with BartPE but Runtime Software does have a plugin for BartPE on their site that works perfectly.

 

This is very odd since SP is the only badkup/image program I know that uses Windows VistaPE for the BootCD environment -- so it should be able to work with any hardware that Windws can work with -- at most you might need to add a driver for newer hardware (i.e., newer than Vista) but with SP's boot disk, you can do that on the fly after booting from the CD (which is pretty nifty).

Btw, you need to make sure with any backup/image program that the boot CD can see all of your drives, the same basic issue faces all of the progs -- jsut diff brands have probs with diff hardware set ups since they don't all use the same OS and drivers.

 

symantec backup exec uses vistape recovery cd.
so does ghost 14
paragon can make you a vistape based cd if the standard linux one doesnt see your drives.

 

true image 11 and the true image bartpe plug in are an unstoppable combo.

 

Yes they are in an unstoppable moaning loop,SP and i believe Paragon also as standalone programs need no tricks or thirth party stuff to get it work normally.

from what i hear or read,its very rare the need to add drivers at a recovery with SP (has a huge support for it),and in case you need to,its simple to do in the recovery environment.

 

I posted in another thread, but will confirm here also that Paragon Drive Backup does see external USB drives; both the installed program and the Recovery CD.

 

somewhere on here this morning, someone said SP had problems finding their hard discs. also this morning my paragon standard 8.51 boot disc would not load, stalled into a blank black screen, just like standard ti11 bootdisc. my paragon bootdisc is isolinux, so is ti11 bootdisc.

 

If you quantify experiences with Acronis and SP,and compare the negative or positive ones,then what can i say more,its all too clear,further talk about these facts is totally unneccesary.

BTW quantifying is IMO the most reasonable approach in comparing the different softwares .

 

have run a quick analysis of complaints reported on wilders for both Acronis and Shadow protect using checkcal.exe and found 94 complaints for Acronis and 3 complaints for Shadow protect. Then checked the sales figures from both products and discovered that in the last 5 years Acronis had sold 94,000 programs and Shadow Protect had only sold 3,000 programs....... but all I really know is that both work fine for me

 

i don't know why
but paragon enable USN Journal on all my partitions

 

Sales obviously are directly related to marketing and spending huge amounts of money,its a bit sad that high quality software without the moneypower(FDISR) are destinied to stay in a niche or wither with time.