Windows Imaging Race. Which one is fastest?

That would imply, if you read the ATI section of thess forums, that an awful lot of people have something terribly wrong with their system.

Speed tests seem rather unhelpful to me, because of the factors that are difficult to keep constant: size of disk, amount of actual data, compression level, verify on/off, SATA/IDE/USB, type of data (you can compress an excel worksheet a lot, you can't compress a wav file much), etc...

And the only really important factor to me is reliability of the RESTORE operation....something not even considered. When I make an image it is running in the background anyway, so I don't even notice it.

 

It is true, the reliability of the restore is of paramount importance, and that's the reason I got ShadowProtect in the first place, reading the long litany of rants in the ATI forum was somewhat discomfortable. I don't really think ATI is less reliable than other applications, but a lot of people forget or they take for granted during the trial period that a validated image will restore for sure.

Speed is also important, especially if you are doing frequent backups/restores, and you don't want to leave your computer on over night. With SP it is around 20 minutes, with ATI 9 it would take certainly more than an hour (even considering data, compression, hardware etc).

 

I can hardly believe that,it must be latest high,high spec laptop and imaging to an external USB drive i suppose Hmmm......,normally to get rates that high,you need latest hardware for desktops.
Remember imaging to external media is way much slower as compared to imaging to an internal second drive.
Do you have an inbuild second drive in your laptop ?

 

On my Thinkpad T400 internal drive is Hitachi 320GB 5,400 rpm imaging to external WD Passport 320GB 5,400 drive. Processor is Intel P8600 with 3 GB memory running Vista Business 32bit if that helps. I am surprised also at the speed of IFW and IFL on this machine.

Gary

 

It just so happens that I live within rock-throwing distance of the Shadow Protect home office. I wish I had gotten into their product before I started using Paragon. I also wish that SP wasn't so damned expensive.

If I ever hear of a discount offer, I might buy it. But paragon has been working flawlessly for me, so I don't want to upset a system that works.

 

Huh......If the big players know ways to penetrate the home users market (Acronis ?).
Is it just me, but i'm surrounded by Noops who bring their money to computershops instead of buying good imaging solutions.

 

If you notice, acronis seems to have discoverd that the secret of reaching customers is marketing everywhere. Norton/symantec does it too. The most worthless pieces of crap software just advertize the hell out of things and I guess suckers buy em....... I did !
You can buy Norton and Acronis at Newegg. paragon ? Macrium ? Shadow Protect ? No.

For other software, that depends upon quality and good user word-of-"mouth" (or internet communication) they have to do at least enough advertizing that users can find them. It is almost as if StorageCraft doesn't want anyone to find out about them ! I live next door to them and only hear about it after months of intense research about image software on obscure internet forums !

 

Home users are not their priority, they mainly focus on companies. Home users are so demanding support-wise
Or so I have understood it.

 

How many home users are there in the world ? China and India are booming markets,from all these people only a diminishing minority has even heard off how they can protect their stuff with imaging.
I guess with good policy and marketing and offcource the needed $$,they can make a huge,very huge profit.

But then if you are small,you have a small mouth so to speak so the big ones become bigger and the small ones stay small or die out.

Its a sad reality that many high quality products are destinied to die due to lack of revenue.