best, Drive image or True Image 8?

Hello, I have been using drive image 7 for a while, but I'm considering a change to true image (based on people rating it). My question is, how do these 2 programs compare? Is TI8 more reliable/user friendly/quicker? What are the benefits?

mtia,

T.

 

Drive Image is Norton Ghost before it was taken over by Symantec. I like Acronis for its ease of use and speed. Having tried Ghost it has more of an old fashioned feel about it booting into a DOS environment whereas Acronis has a modern graphical interface that makes it almost childs play to use. If both worked on my computer (Ghost does not and therefore almost certainly Drive Image does not) I would choose Acronis because of its graphical interface, ease of use and features.

 

I'm still using an old Ghost for my older systems. I looked at DI7 and TI7 for the newer systems recently. (At that time, the newer Ghost had a lot of issues including known issues with the new hardware I was planning.) I preferred TI over DI for a number of reasons.

MUCH smaller footprint. (Both disk and RAM.)
Better/Simpler GUI. (Easy enough for my parents PCs as well as my own.)
Faster.
Smoother disaster recovery. (Quicker to boot, all memory resident - swap media whenever you like etc.)
Far fewer compatibility/crash complaints – every program has some but TI at the time appeared to have far fewer relative to the number of users. (Which is difficult to estimate I grant.)

As I mentioned in another thread, I tried the DVD writing which I felt was rather heavily advertised in DI 7 but I felt let down. It was a packet writing system (kind of understandable but still annoying) and I was amazed at how slow it was. I could image to disk and then burn the images with Nero (no packet writing!) all in a fraction of the time that DI7 would take to write straight to the same DVD drive. I was planning to use USB hard drives anyway but I was annoyed that a heavily advertised feature performed so poorly. Checking forums I found many other posts from people with the same issue. Direct writing of DVDs was the only advertised feature that seemed unique to DI so it was quite a letdown when it turned out to be such a dud for me.

All that said, if you've got a system that is working well for you, I'd keep it. At least until you have some new hardware that forces an upgrade.

 

Neither Drive Image (now in the dubious hands of Symantec), nor Norton Ghost could ever boot to DOS (unless one is using an obsolete OS such as the 9x family). I have used DI 6 for a long time, and it boots to Caldera DOS, which is an emulation of DOS, as there is no underlying DOS in NT based OSs. Sadly DI 6 (DI7 I found it to be quite poor and a behemoth on top) doesn't support SATA drives at all, as I had to learn the hard way, so I moved to ATI. I never use the imaging in Windows, and neither do I care for the Zone (Secure or Safe, whatever), since I do have 2 physical HDDs, so I simply reboot my box with the bootable CD and image my system drive to my storage drive. I find it very easy and convenient, but then again, so was DI 6 until SATA drives made it useless.