Some tips for Newbies....................

I read this entertaining forum daily when I am surfing the web and I see many people having problems of all sorts when testing these types of Backup products. To test a product like this safely, you should follow some protocols to keep you out of the abyss.


1. Have a "go-to" imaging product that works reliably for you that you can turn to without problems. Create an image to fall back on before installing any new product for testing so if things go bad you can get back home without a manual rebuild.

2. When running imaging products within Windows, try to cut down as many startup processes as possible. Check msconfig and the registry for these startups. Startup programs can create problems and having as few as possible never hurts the situation.

3. Before imaging clean out old temp and junk files, defrag if possible. These routine maintenance tasks can increase the likelihood of success in making images.

4. If budgets permit, have a test computer you can destroy without consequence. What I usually do is save and old pc which is viable, but being abandoned. Your goal is to have hardware that matches your scenario. In my case I have some older P4's that are getting retired so I keep them for testing.

5. When testing, use the KISS method. Start out your testing by creating a simple image like image entire IDE disk, verify, restore entire IDE disk. Don't start your testing imaging a P4 RAID, restore to single PIII IDE using Universal Restore. Always see if a product can complete simple tasks before you move on to more complex tasks. In most cases if you can't create a simple image, chances are you definitely can't create a complex one.

6. Have the most recent build of a product if possible. I see people asking here often why TI 6.0 can't image their XP Box and I say to myself "isn't version 9 out now, why are these guys asking questions about versions that support has been dropped on". It's like me calling Microsoft and complaing my Windows 3.11 for Workgroup server isn't seeing my domain, why??


Using some of these ideals when testing should make your life much easier. I'm sure their are more good tips I could give but I figure these are a good start. Any other input from our users to help the Newbies is always appreciated. Testing can be fun when you test in a safe environment, not following a standard and testing recklessly can make the fun of testing a nightmare.

 

Hello Cat-21,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Sharing your experience is very much appreciated.

If you have any further experience to share, please feel free to post it on this forum.

Thank you.
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Tatyana Tsyngaeva