Alternatives to Acronis

I have been using TI9 for several years; I use it in a straightforward way and have never had any problems.

I have a new computer and need to upgrade to TI 11 because 9 doen't recognize my hard drives. I am a little spooked by the accumulation of horor stories on this Board about TI 11.

Any opionions as to more stable alternatives? I've been reading about Shadow Protect - it is more expensive, but well worth it if I can avoid all the problems I'm reading about on this Board. It's a little scary when knowledgable writers on this Board suggest that a user should create the recovery disk and use it exclsuively without having TI 11 running on the computer

Thoughts?

P.S. All I want to do is a full manual backup to an external USB drive - no interest in all the additional features advertised for TI 11.

 

If you have a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive you can get Acronis, version 10, for free:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=7add8b9c4a8ff010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Two things: this is a huge download, about 100mb, also, a few features have been killed but they are only fancy features, the important ones that you need to protect your system are all intact.

Acadia

 

There are quite a few people in these forums who have used Paragon Hard Drive Backup or Hard Disk manager with excellent results. Then again there are a bunch of people who really like Drive Snapshot. Acronis still is used by a lot of the people in these forums also.

 

LenC,
I replaced ATI9 with ShadowProtect Desktop without regrets. It never failed once after numerous backups and restores. Request the Full Evaluation, not the 30-day-trial version, otherwise you won't be able to create the Recovery CD.
Keep in mind that the Recovery CD has a QWERTY keyboard, which is sometimes a little annoying when you have an AZERTY keyboard like me, especially special characters are different.

The upgrade from ATI9 to ATI10 (= more bloat features) was $30, so I bought SP instead. ATI9 never failed on me regarding restoring, but restoring via ATI under Windows failed two times, it stopped suddenly and didn't continue.
Restoring via the ATI Rescue CD was always good and I used it one year successfully.
I had several reasons to ditch ATI, in short, I didn't like the total picture.

 

You may check this thread

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=139716

 

Hoe exactly can I do this? I went to the SP website and clicked the link on the left but it says that the full evaultion is for the corporate product and not the desktop edition.

 

Are you saying that MaxBlast (in the second link) is actually now Acronis version 10?

 

According to what I've been able to find on Google, yes. Also, remember that Acronis did not become Vista compatible until version 10, so Seagate would almost have to be releasing version 10.

Acadia

 

Sounds like Shadow Protect is the way to go. It is substantially more expensive than a TI upgrade ($80 vs. $20), but worth it if it is reliable.

Just curious, any thoughts as to why it is so expensive? Is it because it is not linux based?

Also, they offer 1 year of maintenance for an additional $16. What does that provide? Is that for program updates over the course of the year?

 

Thank you Peter - That's great advice.

BTW, is there a message board out there somewhere specifically for Shadow Protect Users comparable to the Acronis Message Board?