Acronis True Image 11 build 8053

Everyone is entitled to their own point of view and can choose their own method of working with True Image.

I disagree with you completely. I gave up on USB drives nearly two years ago. Compared to removable internal drives they are slow and can be less reliable.

A secure Zone on a second hard drive is by definition a safer place to keep backup images. It also has the great merit of automatically managing backup images on the FIFO basis which I find so much easier to set up and use than "backup locations" or an involved series of schedules to achieve the same result.
I would not recommend anyone to use the startup recovery manager as it can and does lead to problems particularly when users do not realise that there is an easy way to start over.

The view that it is better to do all backup and restore items starting each time from the restore CD I also disagree with. I love the fact that all my backups can be run automatically without even a reboot is one of the best features of True Image.
Restores on the other hand should be started from the rescue CD. This is because, in the case of the systems partition, a re-boot is necessary in any event and in the case of a drive breakdown it is the only possible way to proceed so I check that it all works before disaster strikes.

Xpilot

 

Xpilot, your expertise far exceeds that of the majority of users coming here for help. You know how and when to avoid the pitfalls that lurks around the True Image corner. If all the users had your knowledge, this forum would be non-existant.

 

thanks for all the advise!

 

Well, it's safer inthe sense that you won't accidentally delete one of the images. Howver, it's not otherwsie more secure than jsut having files on a drive. If you backup to somehwere besides a SZ, a person needs ATI to get at the files. But if they have ATI, then they can get at a SZ too.

So you protect against accidental deletion but to do that you muck about with hidden partitons. It's a choice, not especially advantageus one way or the other, imo.

 

I am very interested to see all the comments about Acronis TI 11 and RAID. I downloaded the trial version of TI 11 build 8053 and have spent days trying to make it work. First of all, when attempting to restore from rescue media, it absolutely does not recognize my RAID 5 array on an ASUS P5B Plus motherboard, using the Intel ICH8R chipset and running Windows Vista. Since it has no problem creating an archive from that array, it seems clear that the full program, running under the Windows operating system, can seem the RAID array and read files from it. However, when you boot the system from the rescue media, it absolutely cannot restore to RAID array. Therefore, I would conclude that there is a problem with loading the RAID driver when booting from the rescue media. I was interested to see that others are also having problems with this feature using XP. I guess it's not just my Vista machine. To be fair to these guys at Acronis, at least they let you download a trial version of their software. I purchased Ghost 12.0 and I can't get it to do a great deal of things that the Acronis product does easily on my system and I had to buy the Ghost product to find out! When I have gone to technical support at Symantec, I now see they offer Ghost 14.0 but in order for me to see if that works, I am goint to have to buy it!

Another problem with both of these products. Perhaps all of you gurus already knew this, but it took me quite a while to discover the fact that when you create bootable rescue media in either program, the media does not record the network settings for your network interface card. Instead, when you boot from the rescue media, the environment sends out a DHCP request and if you have a DHCP server on your network, an IP address is served up to the network interface card in your machine. There is nothing about this in the documentation for either product. You must search their knowledgebases HARD to find something that gives you a CLUE to this fact. This may not be important in every environment, but in my home network, I have static addresses on all of my computers but I have a DHCP server set to serve up a narrow range of addresses so that when my relatives and college age children visit and bring their laptops so they can stay in touch with their businesses and school sites, they can get internet access through my wireless access point and DSL modem. I have the firewalls on my static computers set to block all IP addresses in the range served up by the DHCP server. So it took me a while to understand why, when I created an archive on a network share using Acronis Home 11, I could not see that archive when booted into the rescue environment. Once I figured this out, I was able to shut down the DHCP server, and then manually configure the network interface card IP address when booted into the rescue environment and then I could get through the firewalls and see the archives on network shares. This was only with Acronis Home 11. With Ghost 12.0 I was never able to get the network interface card to work at all. Creating a custom bootable media with the driver for my network card on it still failed to get the network card to work. Clearly, both products seem to have problems working with newer hardware. Acronis seems to be doing a better job, to me. Does anyone know of a product that does work?

 

Frank, See these Reviews including Acronis TI11 at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2259186,00.asp

I am about to try ShadowProtect myself (Trial version!) as a friend with a similar setup to yours says its working fine.