What's everyone using for imaging?

New on here but it seems Macrium, ShadowProtect, and IFW/IFD/IFL/Bing are the favorites? Just curious what everyone is running or prefers...thanks.

 

see from year ago
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=251353

 

Cool, thanks. I figured this question has been asked many times before...that and "what is the best?"

 

Paragon Backup & Recovery™ 10 Home Special Edition
Got it from a giveaway months ago.

 

i tried quite a few but i always come back to Windows 7 own imaging utility.

in over 2 years and more than 100 restores it has not failed once.
it is very fast and you can restore without a boot/repair disk if you want to.

the downside is that there is not much options to play with.

 

Currently using Macrium Reflect paid, only needed to restore an image once and it worked like a charm.

 

moontan,

As someone who has experience with imaging apps, could you post a summary of what the Win7 imaging app can and can't do?

I don't have much experience with it and I'm interested to hear if you can restore the image to a different partition on the HD from the original partition? Can you restore the image into a smaller partition? Can you restore the image into a larger partition and fill the partition? Can you restore the image twice to the same HD so you have two OS? Can you restore the image to the same HD which has different partitions from the time when the image was created? Can the image be stored on an external HD? Can the image be stored on a network share and restored from the share?

Thanks.

 

i'm sorry i can't answer your questions.
i'm pretty green when it comes to imaging
i don't do partitioning.
maybe i should start but i don't see the need yet.

you can store the images either on DVD or external HD.
there is no options to do differentials.
it's very barebone as far as options is concerned.
it really is Imaging for Dummies.
and i love it for that.

the only reasons i tried many imaging apps was to compare speed.
Drive Snapshot is the fastest to create the image and had the best default compression file size.
it has very good restore times as well.

the fastest app to restore is Windows 7 own.
image creation times are fast.

 

moontan,

Thanks for your reply. If it suits your purposes, that's fine. If you don't need extra features you are wasting your money with an app that has a 100 features that will never be used.

 

How do you make it do that?

 

J_L,

Credit to moontan,

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=294062

 

you can also access the revovery console at boot time by F1 then F8.

credit for this one to markymoo!

 

Oh I see.. Well, still not gonna switch to built-in, because it doesn't have enough features.

 

Acronis True Image!

 

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition

Does everything I need flawlessly and quickly.

 

image for windows
fantastic product. never had a failure.

 

I agree.

 

I love IFW, but since I don't do live images, IFL is my main app. To me it's one of the best, fastest, most stable imagers out there.

 

I also use the Windows 7 imaging program. I see two problems with it:

1. The images are too big (no compression is used).
2. I haven´t been able to create more than one image in a partition. Even if there is enough free space to save several images, the previous image is always overwritten. The only way to save several images is to use several partitions and save one image in each. Inconvenient.

 

The images are large, yes... however, I have no problem saving multiple images to the same drive or partition.

 

what i do is after taking an image i go to the folder and rename it "WindowsImageBackup 1" for example.
i only keep 3 different images.

in this case, you have to rename the folder "WindowsImageBackup", taking away the number because Win7 looks
for a folder of this name when restoring an image.
you can not manually specify a folder location when restoring an image.
Win 7 scans automatically for the folder which i find a pain because it takes a couple of minutes to scan the machine.

 

Macrium Reflect (free) and Paragon 10.

I like both, I use both.

 

I used TrueImage for many years. There was some technical brilliance behind the original product, but that brilliance wasn't matched by any competence whatsoever in the management of the company, the product line, support, or the software development process itself. I wouldn't now touch Acronis products with a 10' pole. Switched to Macrium Reflect, which shines in every category where Acronis stiinks. I've tried out some of the other products, looking especially closely at the ones from Terabyte Unlimited. I'm afraid I don't share the exuberance for their products that many people seem to have. They do strike me as solid, but the word "stolid" might also apply, as in stolidly geeky. The big failing of TU imaging IMO is their image file format. The files aren't mountable. They offer a sort of Model-T browser capability you can use to access files in an image, but it has a top speed of 5 mph, and you can't do much using it. For example, what if you need to diff against a file in an image, or figure out what accounts for image-b being so much larger than image-a? With mountable images, such things can be dealt with simply and naturally, but TU's non-standard image format makes them awkward or impossible.

 

see sig lol.

i have to say that once acronis is tweaked a certain way, it is (for me) the best by far. fastest backup, fastest restore and its never failed me once in over 4 years.

ignore the bloatware that comes with acronis as it is dire, just use it as a basic imaging program and you cant go wrong.

 

I agree with you. Windows 7 imaging is my preferred choice.

Thanks.