Acronis True image and compability with Serial ATA

Hello!
I work in East Europe for a big international company and we need to make many hard drive images in our work. The main question is: does Acronis True Image recognizes Serial ATA hard disks? Our PCs are (DELL PRESICION 490) At the same time the software must be compatible with other interfaces (for older PCs): IDE, USB. Which version of your product would be suitable for our purpose?

Thank you in advance!
Ivaylo Vasilev

 

Hello Ivaylo Vasilev, welcome to the Forum

Hardware compatibility is a function of the Operating System not the Application. Therefore if your OS can work with the drive and Acronis can work with your OS then it will work. The exception to this rule is the Acronis emergency bootable CD which contains a subset of Linux, which may or may not contain the necessary drivers for your hardware.

Acronis True Image works with many versions of Windows and with Linux. If you have a different OS then I suggest that you contact Acronis directly and ask about compatibility between your OS and ATI.

In your post you wrote :

Are these images for Backup purposes or for Deployment? ATI is primarily a Backup application and is not suited for mass deployment. If your purpose is Deployment then you need Acronis Snap Deploy, details of which you will find at this link :

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdeploy/

 

Thank you for the answer!
OK! These images we using only for Backup, so there is no problem to use ATI. But emergency bootable disc is very important for us, so we really need it to have drivers for all types of hard disks (SATA, USB, SCSI, etc.).

Thank you!

 

Firstly I suggest that you contact Acronis Sales and provide them with a comprehensive overview of your IT infrastructure. They will then be able to recommend the best product for your needs. You can contact Sales at this link:

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/company/contacts.html


Once you know which is the best product for your environment, you should then download one of the free trials and test it with your hardware. You can obtain a free download here:

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/download/

 

In my limited experience with this product, this isn't true, or is so vague as to be useless. I made a full backup, then some time later tried to restore in Windows XP Home. It started off okay, but then needed to reboot, and without error, popped back to Windows XP without doing a thing. No error, no restore, nothing. As others have said, you always need to verify that restores work before depending on them.

 

Hi alanmazer

Perhaps you have misunderstood my post. Apologies if my post was not sufficiently clear, so let me try again....

Hardware compatibility is a function of the Operating System and not the Application. (Exceptions are low-level applications such as Games which often incorporate a bespoke subset of an OS to address the hardware directly thereby increasing performance).

In a standard PC environment the Hardware communicates via a Driver with the Operating System. Ignoring exceptions, such as Games, standard Applications communicate with the hardware via the OS. The critical component in this communication chain is the Driver. Drivers are notoriously difficult to code - and very expensive, with Driver programmers being amongst the highest-paid persons in the development industry.

Applications which are correctly coded and which work flawlessly with a specific version of an OS will work with the attached Hardware providing that the Driver performs its task at least adequately.

Perfect Drivers...? Perfect Applications...? Perfect Operating Systems...? Do these things exist...? Perhaps on Planet Zen but not yet on Earth!!

Your comment on verifying backups...

Actually "verifying" or "validating" a backup does very little. It basically does a "checksum" test and if the checksums correlate the backup is "verified". In real terms that means absolutely nothing. The ONLY way to be sure that a backup will restore is to test-restore the backup to a spare disk or partition and then physically check that the data is OK or for a system partition that the restored system will boot. Testing is the only real assurance that your backup is good.

T.

 

You are providing the OP with excellent information and I thank you for your posts. However, I think you are de-emphasizing the importance of performing validations. Validation does accomplish one important thing: It tells the user that their backup file has not become corrupted since it was created. Since many users store their backup files on external USB drives or optical media, both of which are known to be at increased risk of file corruption, this information is worth knowing.

If a successful validation is followed by an unsuccessful restore then at least the user can focus their troubleshooting on other aspects of their system rather than blaming a corrupted backup file.

 

As I found out the hard way, True Image 10 Boot-CDs unfortunately do not support SATA drives in all cases and chipvariants. It is a must to build another different bootable CD starting with a Bart PE CD that has a TrueImage plugin incorporated. Then you get all the support that you may need, USB, FireWire, SATA, eSATA and probably SCSI too (but as I do not have any SCSI drives or controllers anymore I cannot assure yyou this)

 

You are correct. The boot CD uses Linux as the OS and Linux drivers typically lag 6 to 18 months behind hardware releases. This is no fault of the boot CD. Acronis, like everyone else, is dependent upon manufacturers and the Linux community to create drivers.

This is good advice. However, remember that Ivailo works for a "big international company" so one may assume that the infrastructure will include a variety of OS's (Windows Server; Win2000; XP; Unix; Linux) creating BartPE CD's, in this type of environment may be considerably more difficult than in a home or small business environment.

T.

 

I had the same problem with a dell optiplex .. upgrading to a newer build fixed it.

 

Well, I am a XP guy only. But once you have a Bart PE CD you can work with basically every harddisk hardware and many file systems, NTFS and FAT at least, the most common Linux file systems too, I would assume. Especially in a mixed hardware environment this solution seems workable for me.

 

You can do a test validation from the bootCD -- if it works with your hardware, then you should be fine and you can subsequent validations from the Win environment, knowing that BootCD drivers work with yur hardware.

 

Hello ivailo and everyone,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please note that when Acronis True Image (any addition) is running under Windows, it uses operating system drivers to work with devices, therefore, it works with all the hard disk drivers detected by the operating system.

The Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue CD is Linux based and has it's own assortment of drivers for the wide variety of modern hardware, including drivers for IDE, SATA, USB, SCISI hard drives and hardware RAID controllers.

Should you experience a problem with accessing hard drive when using Acronis True Image Bootable CD, please submit a request for technical support and provide us with the exact vendor and model of the hard drive and hard drive/RAID controller you use along with Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) (check <PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU POST for the instructions on how to create it) and we will help you solve the problem.

ivailo:

Please note that depending on the operating system you use on the local computer you might need to use deferent versions of Acronis True Image. Such as Acronis True Image 10.0 Home and Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation are compatible with Windows Vista, Windows XP Home and Professional operating systems including Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000 Professional.

Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced server, Windows 2000 Server and Windows NT 4.0 Server are supported by server versions of Acronis True Image: Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server

Note that we have a flexible system of discounts and the amount of the discount varies depending on the number of copies you want to purchase. We would recommend that you contact our Sales Team by filling up the Volume License Request form available at the Purchase Acronis Corporate Solutions page of Acronis web site.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov