Acronis TI or ShadowProtect

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by samy, Aug 20, 2008.

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  1. appster

    appster Registered Member

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    samy, I have used (and compared) ATI Home v11 and SP v3.1 and while I did not have any problems using either one from within Windows, the SP Boot CD could not recognize my Promise disk controller (in either of its boot-modes) and consequently, could not 'see' my hard-drives! ATI's Boot CD has no problem in that regard.

    Although the Acronis forum seems to be full of problematic posts, I have never had any problems using ATI. It is a well thought-out and user-friendly product. I did however, find it noticeably slower in operation than SP. On the flip-side, ATI can be had for 1/3 the price of SP, so if price is a consideration, imho ATI is hard to beat.

    That said, if price is not important, you might also want to give Drive Snapshot a look... ;)
     
    Last edited: Sep 25, 2008
  2. Jo Ann

    Jo Ann Registered Member

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    I completely agree with this. There are a number of problem posts about ATI simply because of the exposure of an ATI forum here on Wilders (with a substantial following)! People come to forums such as that one to describe issues they are encountering - seeking help. More often than not, those issues are due to improper use of the program.

    While I prefer DS, it's mainly because I have found it to backup and restore appreciably faster than ATI, I still believe ATI is better suited for those who are less PC-iiterate or those who just don't want to pay the price for DS (or SP).
     
  3. wat0114

    wat0114 Guest

    ShadowProtect is very fast and so far flawless for me. I've had a few minor problems with ATI 10 but it's also been quite reliable. The only thing I don't like about SP, is it won't let you activate an installation on a different drive on the exact same machine no less, until the install on the other drive is first de-activated. I can understand this restriction for different machines, different hardware, but not for the same machine.
     
  4. Long View

    Long View Registered Member

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    For me SP is the best overall at present but I have been uanble to get SP or DS to work with whole encryptred drives. Acronis on the other hand has no problem . As always which is best depends upon hardware, other software, and what you are trying to do
     
  5. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    wat0114,

    I read somewhere this is supposed to protect your incremental recovery points.

    What advantages do you see with two SP installs on the same computer?
     
  6. wat0114

    wat0114 Guest

    I have two quite different software environments on the two drives, even though the machine is still the same. I just like to have the extra flexibility of choosing one or the other. It's a bit of a hassle de-activating one install to use the other drive, but I can certainly live with it. Besides, using the boot cd to backup or restore is no big deal either.
     
  7. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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  8. wat0114

    wat0114 Guest

    Thanks Brian. That thread does not quite apply to me, but it's an interesting one nonetheless. In the end, all that really matters is that SP or ATI gets me back to a perfectly clean slate if needed, so I consider these two of my favorite and most valuable software licenses :) SP is my most recent. I'm very impressed with its speed and no hassle backup/restore capabilities, even using the iso cd.
     
  9. grnxnm

    grnxnm Registered Member

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    <edit> Disregard previous contents and refer to link two posts up.
     
  10. RadicalDad

    RadicalDad Registered Member

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    My experience with Acronis TI 2009 is that its quite buggy. The problem seems to be the new feature(s) that track your base / incremental / differential backups. If you back up to removable USB drives, you're hosed with ATI 2009.

    If the USB drive containing the backups is not present when ATI goes looking for them, the fun begins. That can happen right at system boot as ATI has a background process that tracks the backup location. This is true for backups in regular partitions and also in the Acronis Secure Zone.

    The "fun" is that ATI can't find your backup images once its been "disconnected" from them. This is true even if the right USB drive is attached when starting a backup. When this happens, ATI will create a new full backup even though the old full and incrementals / differentials are there. ATI starts naming the new backups with ever longer strings of numbers attached. Once ATI got really lost, it named one of my backups using what appears to be a registry key. Thats when I gave up testing. Similar problems were observed using the Secure Zone - except that the name of the backup disappears entirely, and different backups are appended to each other willy-nilly.

    Once this problem starts, there seems to be no way to fix it. AND - this also seems to hose the ATI utility that lets you explore your backups in Windows Explorer. Explorer became unstable and began to crash repeatedly. Good thing I had a full image backup created just before I started testing!

    If you want to use multiple USB drives so you can have an off-site backup, ATI 2009 won't work for you at all. I've sent 4 emails to ATI tech support, and haven't had any response in over a week.

    I'm currently testing ShadowProtect 3.3 to see if it has similar problems.
     
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