Seagate DiscWizard/Maxtor MaxBlast

How good are the freewares: Seagate DiscWizard & Maxtor MaxBlast? I have not yet tried either of them. Two of my three PC's have Seagate hard drives in them.

What reason(s) would there be for a person to upgrade to the Retail Version of Acronis when these freeware versions are available.

For the typical PC user who just wants to be able to easily periodically make and restore hard drive images would DiscWizard/MaxBlast be considered adequate?

Thank you.

 

I believe for most folks, yes. These programs are, I believe, Acronis version 10, stripped down of course, while Acronis is now at version 11.

Even though the freebies are stripped down they still include all of the important features that you would need to recover.

Acadia

 

I started with Seagate Discwizard. It's a feature-limited version
of Acronis True Image. There are two drives in my machine, one is
a Seagate, the other WDC. As long as at least one drive in the machine
is Seagate, Discwizard works fine. I partitioned one drive, and did
only full back-up images, which were saved to a data partition.
Discwizard imaged and retored perfectly 100% of the time.

The PDF users manual is here:

http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf

I eventually bought the full version of ATI 10 from Acronis, only so
I could have direct access to Acronis Support if I ever need it,
but I never have. ATI has been 100% for me in over 30 restores.
Then again, I never try to do anything exotic.

If all you need is to make an occasional full back-up image to
recover from, I highly recommend Discwizard. Beats the heck
out of Windows System Restore.

 

If the hard drive was Western Digital and the external drive Seagate would you still be able to use the Seagate DiscWizard software for backing up and restoring the system? Thanks in advance.

 

I don't know if Discwizard would install if it did not find any Seagate
drives, but I suspect if you load Windows with the external Seagate HDD
connected, so that it is recognized by Windows Disk Management, that
Diskwizard would install. Only my guess, I'm not a hardware expert.

Once installed, however, you can restore images from an external drive.

 

Yes, as long as the Seagate is attached. I cloned my Seagate HDD using SDW to a bigger Hitachi in an enclosure, and swapped them out. Now I use SDW to back up my OS to the Seagate. If I try to run the program without the Seagate being attached it won't work.

With help from Brian K I moved My Documents to D drive and use Karen's Replicator to back up my data to a WD external.