What will Vista do to impact the purchase of TI?

Being an owner of ~1000 TI server licenses - I can't help but wonder what Vista & Longhorn Server is going todo to the sales of TI and products like it. If you don't already know, Vista (and soon longhorn) comes with Imaging backup built-in, and FREE. Using any bootable Vista DVD you can restore a Vista backup image. This is VERY powerful. Also, while I have not tested it myself, I hear that the MS image format allows for a universal restore ability.

I am guessing that products like TI will have to improve on the features of the built-in imaging that Microsoft is providing for free. I know that TI is already doing this now with it's "management" features of the enterprise products, but for those of us whom already own network management systems I am sure we will only need to build scripts that will manage the built in imaging system. Thus providing the same thing without the cost.

Anyway, this isn't a bash on Acronis in anyway. I love their products completely. I also have a HUGE interest in their software (and yearly maintenance fees). I made this thread so that we can feedback on this topic and see what each other thinks Acronis is going to-do to improve the products to compete with this. Immediatly, I can imagine that the prices will be driven down. What else?

 

If the backup process provides several generations of backups and these can contain all the partitions of a main drive it would be worth considering.
It would also have to be able to do bare metal restores and be able to work as fast as TI with internal drives.
As they say the Devil is in the detail.
I for one however will not be rushing out to buy any of the many versions of Vista as soon as it is officially released. I am quite happy with what I am using at present so I will watch from the side lines to see what develops.

Xpilot

 

WindowsXP includes a defragger but many folks find aftermarket defraggers nicer to use -- I prefer perfectdisk. I wonder whose imaging software MS got a hold of -- it's likely a stripped down version. MS has to walk a fine line between satisfying simpler users with lots fo basic features while providing room for other application vendors to ensure it can capture that market too (and without running into "monopoly" issues with the feds again).

It has been reported that MS decided not to include certain features in Vista rather than risking the too-many-apps-in-the-OS problem with the feds again.

The same will likely be the case for the image back up and other tools in windows -- basic implementations but generally more like golf carts than automobiles.

Otoh, I used to buy a number of Utilities religiously and find I little use for most of them now, getting by with Windows weaker implementations is often adequate and makes it harder to justify the aftermarket add-ons.

 

You guys are totally off base. What Microsoft calls "imaging" is not imaging like we think of. They are making things very confusing with the way they use the term. Plus they use the term "imaging" to mean three different things.

What comes on the Vista DVD is a sysprepped "image". They loaded Vista on a machine, syspreped it and then saved it in their new file format called .wim . So what they call an image is really a file format. It has all of the operating system files in one big wim file. Sort of like a zip file. When you load Vista you have to boot with WinPE because the setup.exe in Vista does not load a mini file system anymore like the old versions of Windows. WinPe is loaded and since WinPE is a mini version of Vista it knows how to read and write to a hard drive. Then from WinPE the .wim file is extracted to the hard drive. After it is extracted the machine is rebooted and mini setup is run.

The great thing about the .wim file format is that you can modify Windows inside of it without having to load it on a machine, change things the way you want them and then sysprep it again and make a new .wim file. They provide tools that let you create an unattted xml file through a gui. Then you can apply the settings from the xml file to the "image" in the .win file and it changes the settings in the registry inside the .wim file.

Also, the .wim file that ships with Vista contains ALL the Vista versions inside of it, thanks to single instance storage, but you can only load the one you are licensed for.

 

You're on the wrong track. Vista has a built in backup utility that creates an image of the system drive directly to a DVD. Nothing to do with sysprep or the way the Vista install disk is built.

I've used the backup utility in Vista to create an image of my system drive and, then, to restore it to another drive. Works good!

 

I didn't know that. Cool ! I'll have to check that out.

But you can still use sector based imaging tools like Acronis to "image" a hard drive partition. Microsoft still doesn't provide anything that works outside of windows.

Also I wonder how good it works with locked files. It's probably using the volume shadow copy service but it still may not be as reliable as making a sector based image AFTER windows is shut down.

 

While I see the use of sector based backup for utility purposes, as long as we can take a snapshot backup to an image and then also create incrementals of that backup... then the Vista/Longhorn backup is going to really shake up the TI/Norton Ghost market.

And yes, it uses volume shadow copy. This is the same thing that TI uses on a live system.

Edit: what I mean by utility is that we use it for one off backups. We use this often and is VERY important no doubt.

 

I just took a look at the Complete PC Backup utility in Vista RC1 and immediately noted two shortcomings.

1. It appears that the entire hard drive (i.e. PC) must be backed up. There does not appear to be any way to back up an individual partition.

2. It appears that the backup device (hard drive or DVD RW) must be directly attached to the PC via IDE or SATA. There does not appear to be anyway to backup to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive or a USB drive.

 

Sounds good and straight forward so far

If scheduling and automatic management are included it is well on the way to providing a good basic system.

Xpilot

 

This was posted the Acronis support forum and while I understand that the original poster had ATI in mind witht he question, this is not a support issue. This is more of a software comparision discussion. Hence, I will move it now to "software & services."