Acronis True image or alternative?

Having read all the enthusiastic comments about Shadow Protect I thought I would give it a trial. The Free Trial downloaded and installed OK but would not run - trial expired. I'm assuming that I should have been able to make and restore an image and this trial is not eunuchware. As the program appears to use activation and would not run I pushed the button and had Acronis restore my system.

Now I'm not saying Shadow Protect is no good. All I'm saying is that the trial wouldn't run. Some conflict with other software/hardware --- whatever. Certainly makes me question the more reliable blanket statements though - like all software it will not work for everyone.

 

Most likely their trial/authentication scheme is buggy. Note that it was not programmed by StorageCraft, but by Silicon Realms (Armadillo).

Personally it saddens me whenever a company with reputation goes to a 3rd party for protection routines over which they have no control.

 

Anyway - thanks to Lodore I just picked up Paragon Disk Manager 8.5 with a 70% discount. For me Paragon is slower than Acronis and the images are larger. I don't need an Alternative to Acronis but at $23.95 I just could not resist

 

Thanks everybody!
I am just bit worried that i am not able to uninstall ATI 10 completely. So for now i stick with it. It is working for me. Well when the time comes to get rid off ATI 10, i will give Shadow Protect a serious thought.

Kristian

 

I found the images smaller and and faster to make.
the images with acronis where like 56gb and took 3hours.
with paragon its like 50gb image and 2hours 47minutes.
when i first looked at paragon i thought acronis isnt working so i need a replacement.
looked at the prices and thought i dont care how much it is.
then someone kind on this forum gave me the 70percent discount code and thought cant go wrong there.
lodore

 

Thanks Peter. I really hate eunuchware. There is no point in having a trial unless
you can try everything. Oh well with Paragon not working properly for me ( I probably did something wrong) and Shadow Protect hiding its wonders from me
I will stick with Acronis.

 

The evaluation that I received will not allow a bare metal restore.

 

the full evauation of shadow protect desktop allowed me to be baremetal recovery.
burn the iso to cd boot from it and restore the image.
lodore

 

ive tried many softwares, and keep going back to my acronis.

i have a full backup, takes only 3gb and its safe and secure on 'acronis secure zone', hidden partition that i cant see, and is always there

 

I just can't, for the life of me, understand this strategy. I mean, the *primary* reason most of us shell out $$ for this type of software is to have the ability to restore our machines to their exact state in the event of a HDD failure, isn't it?

If I could be 100% assured that my main drive would never fail, I think I'd be inclined to just copy data manually to another drive (or other media) and call it a day; I wouldn't bother to image the entire drive.

 

plus internal and external drives are so cheap these days.
if you have a laptop you can just buy a cheap external rather than using the secure zone.
lodore

 

Ultra cheap! I recall hearing about an 80 MB drive (My Book, I believe) a while ago that was on sale for something like $60. That's not a whole heck of a lot more than the price of the backup software itself.

 

prius,

Judging from those comments, I don't believe you have an adequate understanding as to how ATI (or any disk-imaging software) works.

The SecureZone is Acronis' means for facilitating an 'instant-restore' of your system. It does that in much the same way as PC manufacturers like Dell and HP provide an original system restore, by using an image on a hidden partition (pesonally, I don't use ATI's SecureZone). As Pete suggested, none of those methods are of any value if your disk crashes!

The primary use of ATI (and every other disk-imaging software) is to create an image of your entire disk (or individual partitions) and to save that image to an external hard drive! Also, a one-time requirement is to create an Emergency Boot CD (look for the 'life-preserver' button on ATI's main screen). Should your disk crash, (or if your system won't bootup for whatever reason), you can then use the Emergency Boot CD you created to bootup your system, access your disk-images (on your ext. drive) and restore them to your existing (or replacement) system drive. All of the necessary programs and drivers you will need to do that should be on the Boot CD you created. That's the way disk-imaging software works.

Hth, pv

 

I also ran the evaluation copy for version 2.somethingor other.
Found a bug, which got fixed.

I'm just waiting for vesion 3.

Shadow Protect did appear tobe more capable that TI, and as I recall, it ran faster and compressed better.

My only complaint is that it has the same

deficiency as Ghost with respect to incremental/differential backups. Doubt that this was remedied in version 3. Shadow Protect is fine for doing non-scheduled FULL backups.

I ferget whether/how Shadow Protect handles Linux partitions. Since I will be installing Linux in a multiboot system, that's really important to me now.

 

i thought shadow protect desktop handles incremental images well.
i made a few incremental images with it in my full evauation.
you do the incremental image and then you can do an incremental of the incremental.
you can even get it to make a incremental image every 15mintes
lodore

 

yup i tryed that when i was testing it out.
i just need to work out how to do incremental images in paragon
i ticked the perform incremental image tickbox but doesnt seme to work.
i have asked support and now waiting.
lodore

 

Read the link I posted about Ghost.
You will see the problem.

 

you mean this?

quote start"
With a Recovery Point Set (RPS), Ghost puts a vsnap.idx file on every drive. This mechanism is used to keep track of what has changed (it causes noticeable overhead). so after you do a FULL backup with an RPS, subsequent RPS backups will use the info in the vsnap.idx to create an incremental backup. And this works.

Butt, if you decide to create another FULL RPS on another external drive, the weakness in the mechanism shows.

When you create th 2nd FULL RPS, it works as expected, butt the vsnap.idx are updated to reflect the new fULL RPS. So when you go back to do an incremental backup with the first FULL RPS, things have gotten out of sync and the first RPS may believe that "too many" changes have been made and will instead do a FULL backup instead of an incremental backup, which not only takes longer, but can result in insufficient disk space as the old RPS is not deleted until the new one is completed.
quote end"
lodore

 

ABSOLUTELY! And this is with old version 6.0

Which reminds me i need to pick up that Hard Drive monday because i have a Paragon image waiting to be restored. LoL

 

paragon hdm 8.5 has a mount as drive letter where as for 8.0 and older versions you use the volume explorer.
the mount as drive letter option in 8.5 has a few issues sometimes with mounting and dismounting but i reported it to suppoort and will be fixed in next build.
lodore