Alternative to True Image (nervous nellie)

It's confusing because there is no one answer. The answer really depends on your particular needs and budget. A good solution is to evaluate the products yourself to see which one is the best fit for you. Most of the imaging products out there have free evaulations.

For instance, you may find the following features critical, or dispensible:

Incremental backup support (only backup changes since last backup)
Ability to archive directly to optical media
Ability to mount backup images
Ability to restore your backups to different computers (and successfully boot)
Ability to do bare-metal recovery/restore (restore your OS from an alternate boot environment)
Ability to verify image data integrity
Ability to schedule backups so that it's an unattended process
Ability to schedule very frequent backups, perhaps every few minutes
Ability to take backups without stopping applications or shutting down (snapshot functionality)
Ability to take relatively clean backups by leveraging platform technologies like VSS
Fast backups (take little time doing backups)
Efficient backups (take little cpu/memory to do backups)
Small backups (good compression ratios on backup image files)
Secure backups (good encryption support on backup image files)
Usable backups (some products have chronic corruption problems in their backup images)
Remotely manageable (can control multiple machines from one user interface)
Remotely manageable recovery environment
Wide device coverage in recovery environment
Light install (product doesn't consume 100s of MB when installed)
etc...

Figure out the feature set that you want/need, then find the product that has the best implementation of that feature set.

 

Thanx for reply
Yeah i knew your answer would be something like that

I don't really need any features.

I'm making the "perfect" install using Nlite custom install. Will install all my programs and make an image I can restore when system gets laggy.

Just tried Terabyte Image for DOS. Works really well and fast. But can't restore from File, says in DOS only. Hmm isn't that where I was. In DOS I mean.

What is needed to be able to recover to and restore from file ?

 

I figured it out. I was trying to Restore an Image located on a 2nd partition. But when I tried to access it using RECOVER FROM FILE I got the error This option is only available in DOS
I figured out I could accomplish this choosing RECOVER FROM PARTITION instead.

But I have a new problem:

I can't find any option to make the partition I'm Recovering to be marked as ACTIVE. Do you know how to do this ?
I know it’s possible with BootIt. But I really don’t want to have to use a 2nd app.

Thanx in advance

 

I used the trial in the past. When I recovered my C drive that was active before recovery, it worked without doing anything more.

 

@nightrhyme

If you are restoring "over" your current active partition with IFD, it will be the default boot partition as it is currently.

If you are restoring your current boot partition to a different partition, that is in effect copying the partition.

AFAIK IFD does not have built in boot management capabilities, but I have never really played with cmd options.

IFW has "set active" as option with restore function: see attached image from page 19 in my manual.

If you want to rearrange your boot partitions after restore with IFD, probably need BING or adjust boot.ini file or delete partitons to correspond to current boot.ini.

Heh just use Bing for everything; installed or not it is a great tool for imaging and partition managemnt. Almost idiot proof in MY experience

Regards

 

Thanx guys.

Mailed Terabyte:

Does that mean I just put in an "A" or "TA" in the additional options field in IFD ? And what is ment by for good measure ?

 

Cool
Should have known there would be something.

Sorry cant advise as dont really know IFD that well.
Bloody Terabyte support and cryptic replies: they adjust the level of response to the level of query and implied expertise.

For me replies always couched at kindy level and I like it that way.

Follow the manual and experiment, good way to get V.good with the apps very quickly. ( You know you have a good back-up if you bork the recovery )

Will have to gao back and look at IFD again.

 

Emailed them again

Here is the entire conversation:

Me: Was trying your, so far, fantastic software: Image for DOS. Seem to fill my needs.

Just one big problem.

I can’t figure out how or if it’s even possible to set the partition I’m restoring as ACTIVE.

I know it’s possible with BootIt. But I really don’t want to have to use a 2nd app. Isn’t it possible somehow to achieve this in Image for DOS using a parameter or something ?

TeraByte: Hello,

Use the A option (TA for good measure). You can use it on the command line or the additional parameters field interactively.

Me: Does that mean I just put in an "A" or "TA" in the additional options field in IFD ? And what is ment by for ”good measure” ?

TeraByte: Yes.

T option rewrites the MBR code as well.

Great support, Great software What's not to like.

Tested it a couple of times. Accessed the target disk in 2nd OS and made sure it wasn't active and un-bootable. Did as TeraByte said and restored partition. Worked like a charm.

I think I found my Holy Grail

 

So what is the difference between A and TA?

Still can,t understand what is "for good measuire"

 

Suppose my C partition is still bootable. I recover an image of C to D, then make D active from inside windows( from C) Will it work?

 

Me neither But I guess it's for use if your MBR somehow got screwed

Yes it will work. But the point is you don't need to enter windows to accomplish that. Do it from IFD...

 

I've had a lot of experience with Ghost 10 and with Acronis TRue Image 9, and a bit recently with Shadow Protect. So here's my comments.

Both Ghost and Shadow Protect suffer from the shortcoming described in http://forums.hardwareguys.com/ikonboard.cgi?s=4492619c5fa1ffff;act=ST;f=13;t=4573.

I use Ghost 10 for Full backups, and TI for Fulll/incremental/Differential backups.

Never checked into that, perhaps in the future.

All 3 products have this capability.
TI includes the capability of faking read-only access in Win 2000.

Too many issues here for a simple discussion.

All TI and Ghost do is verify a checksum.
As I recall, ShadowProtect has a separate tool to verify checksums.

To actually compare the backup with the original drive, you need tools such as:

ReadFile
GetFileTypeDistribution
CompareDrives

Al three products do this.

On my system TI is MUCH slower than GHost.
Shadow Protect seems a bit faster than Ghost.

[quote\Efficient backups (take little cpu/memory to do backups)[/quote]

Ghost uses more resources than TI. Did not compare with SP.

All three compress well, TI defaults better than Ghost. Do not recall how SP compares.

At least Ghost and TI, and mabe sP, suffer from the problem desribed in http://www.standards.com/index.html?CreateFileFailure.

 

Heh, I'm too lazy and small brain can easily be confused with IFD options so use windows or BING where I can "see" the partitions and drives better.

Be careful it is interesting how easy it is to lose track of where you are restoring to and from where. Can accidently "loop" over OS or <- ...-> get lost.

Also can be confusing when rebooting as to which partition you are in.
Revise the conventions for "renaming" boot paritions ie booti,ini may reboot into "D" partition or wrong partiton and cause some confusion. It is ,too me anyway, easier in BING ot keep track of WHERE THE HELL i AM. and be able to shift partitions around to maintain structure

Make sure (if not using a direct boot) that your partitions coincide with boot.ini or vice versa

it can be helpful to give partitions a specific name: MyComputer>r click on disc icon or in list> rename

s##T i EvEn geT LoST in mY oWN pOsTS.

 

@Nightrhyme

Heh: you"re not alone

@Peter

You know it, it probably just is.
Dont forget if you rewrite the standard MBR you might mess with FDISR.

Why do you guys use IFD ahead of BING or IFW?
AFAICR: IFW and BING will just write the IFD by default if required,

 

Fine.
Not having had to redo MBR and not having BING installed as yet, I couldn't recall if that was a problem or not.

must have been those other snapshot and imaging tools lol,


oooppss typo up there ... IFW and BINGwill rewrite the MBRby default...

 

I don't know if the paramater "T" has any effect alone. All TeraByte said was:
Either put in "A" or "TA". But other than that you get the concept..

I too use IFD all the way and yes it is important to give your partitions decriptive names so you don't get confused

 

Is Acronis Universal Restore Plugin to Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 the best choise for allowing an image to restore to computers with different hardware or is there a better alternative software out their that allows restoring an image to computers with different hardware?

Also, I read some where that some one had an image from Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 stored on an external usb 2.0 hard drive and tried putting the image on a computer with different hardware, but the usb adpater on the older computer was usb 1.1. Also, they said there build was Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 but the build they were using for Acronis Universal Restore Workstation plug in was 9.1.3534. When they tried restoring the image off the external usb 2.0 external hard drive on to the older computer (usb 1.1) with different hardware, they said it was going to take around a day to restore.

What was more likely the cause for the slow restore, the fact that the old computer had a usb 1.1 adapter and not a usb 2.0 adapter or the fact that the Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 and the Acronis Universal Restore Workstation 9.1.3534 didn't match in the build version?

As you can tell from my post my biggest decision in purchasing imaging software is one that will allow me to restore an image to computers with different hardware (I have way too many windows xp professional SP2 images) and that it doesn't take a day to restore as I'm hearing reports that Acronis Universal Restore plug in is taking that long to restore an image to computers with different hardware.

Sorry for the questions just interested in the product and I feel this thread is a good place to get answers to alternate solutions. Thanks!

 

I'm curious to know what the forum members' experiences are with universal-restore features in various backup products. I've used this feature in both the latest incarnations of Ghost and True Image and have never *once* been able to boot an image restored with these products' respective "universal restore" features. I wonder if my experience is an outlyer, or the common case.

We have finished implementing this feature for ShadowProtect. It's easy to use and extremely effective. We plan to release it as part of our upcoming 3.0 release of ShadowProtect. All of your older images are automatically supported by this feature (no special addition needs to be made to your image files for this to work, as is necessary with Ghost). Also the feature is built in - there is no additional installation necessary, and it's significantly faster (4X) than the competition. I think you guys are going to like it very much. Incidentally, in addition to allowing you to easily restore images from one machine to another, it will also allow you to easily restore your images to a virtual machine (microsoft or VMware) or to restore images from virtual machines to real hardware.

 

Your universal restore feature sounds great to me. Look forward to it. When you have time, could you comment on how ShadowProtect handles association of incremental backups with full backups. For some reason, I could not restore from an incremental the other day because I guess somehow it got loose from a full backup. I think there was comment above on this page relating to this. Overall though, ShadowProtect is the best product that works with my particular hardware/software setup and I highly recommend it.

Gary

 

Any news on the release fro test date?

I have TI workstation - but don't much care for it - as a FD-ISR user it has limited use.

I would like a more generic approach - something like this but automatic and able to replace the HAL