Is there a rock solid backup program?

[RJ]

I work for a small business in which to have something better than a 700Mhz desktop, I have to furnish my own desktop out of my own money. I built an Asus P5B with the Intel E4600 2.4Ghz running XP Pro. I am using it as a server running parts image programs for Polaris equipment and lawn mowers for my fellow employees. So an enterprise type backup system is out of the question and downtime has to be kept to a minimum. I have used Acronis True Image for several versions up to version 11 with mixed results. I actually long for the good ol Drive Image of past before Symantec got a hold of it as it ran in DOS and seemed to be very reliable and saved me several times. I have seen in another post that there is a Drive Image program by another company called Terabyte(?) but they have only released V2 very recently and I can not find a good track record for it yet. I tried Ghost years ago and that was hard for me to understand. Is there anything that I can trust? True Image 2009 seems to be a hit and a miss. I have a 80 GB SATA drive that I want to backup to a 250 GB drive. Thanks for any input that you may have.

[PeterT]

I use TI 11 Home from the bootable CD. I do not install it. I am quite happy with it's performance in both backups and restores. What problems did you have with TI? Did you install it or run it from the bootable CD?

[ctal]

You'll want to look at this thread:

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/f49/lo...am-112229.html

Although I have no experience with it, ShadowProtect has been highly reviewed, and was developed by some of the same people who had been responsible for Powerquest's Drive Image, prior to Powerquest's acquisition by Symantec. As you'll see in the link, assuming you are not using Linux its only downside appears to be cost.

I've used the previous version of Terabyte's programs extensively, including the imaging function, and found it to be totally reliable. It can't do incremental backups, and since it is dos-based, if you have AHCI enabled in your bios you would have to turn it off for the hard drive to be seen, and if you have a usb keyboard or mouse you would have to have legacy usb support enabled in the bios for them to be seen. But those are minor inconveniences at most, and the key things are that it (or at least the earlier version that I used) is 100% reliable, and its cost is an absolute bargain.

Regards,
-- Al

[ctal]

Addendum to my previous post: My comments about the Terabyte programs do NOT apply to the version that runs within Windows, which I have not tried. In general, I would be hesitant to have total confidence in a program that is used to image the Windows partition while running within Windows.

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by RJ

... I have used Acronis True Image for several versions up to version 11 with mixed results. ...

Would you articulate what the issues were for us TI users please?

[RJ]

Originally Posted by zapionics<alt>

Would you articulate what the issues were for us TI users please?

On my home PC with Vista Premium SP1 and two hard drives I only do full backups. It is a crap shoot if file verification comes up with a clean slate. I have had clean verifications in the past, but restores generated errors. But these procedures have been done in Windows and not from a boot up disk. That is something that I have not done and should try as the old DOS environment should be safer and cleaner as long as SATA and larger hard drives are supported. I still have Drive Image 4 and 5 stashed away on a shelf as my understanding is that they are not compatible with larger drives above 80GB nor with SATA. Maybe they will still work, but I should try TI in bootup first or Terabyte. I was not aware of Shadowproject, but I will look into that also. I am not afraid to pay $80 for a rock solid program. Thanks for the inputs.

[bassgt47]

+1 for Shadowprotect. Backups and restores are fast and their customer support is outstanding. Check out their forums for user input.

StorageCraft

[RJ]

Originally Posted by bassgt47

+1 for Shadowprotect. Backups and restores are fast and their customer support is outstanding. Check out their forums for user input.

StorageCraft

I checked out their forum and there is hardly anything compared to Acronis's forum. The problems that were there were usually hardware or software conflicts with Shadowprotect, but hardly ever the program itself. I thought that it could be because True Image has a much wider user base than Shadowprotect which it could be part of the equation also. I searched reviews of True Image at New Egg and Amazon and lots of mixed experiences. A couple of posts over at Amazon mentioned switching from True Image to Shadowprotect with good experiences under the True Image products. I am going to try backing up with True Image from a boot CD first on a home test machine first, but Shadowprotect sounds very promising.

[RJ]

Just a follow-up. I liked my research results on Shadowprotect, but since I already had Acronis True Image 11, I created a boot disk through the program and have been using that. Might not be as fast as the True Image through Windows, but so far it seems to work very well with my internal SATA drives and my Maxtor external USB 250GB drive. I just wanted to post a follow-up in case somebody does a search for this type of subject. Thanks guys for the input.

[PeterT]

Glad to hear the bootable disc is working for you. As I said earlier, it works great for me. No issues.
Heads up, if you run into any problems on later chipsets and and have to use the 'safe' option, contact Acronis and they'll give you a multi-parameter
version of the boot disc. It solved the problem for me. I can use this version of the boot disc on a P45 chipset in 'full' mode and have access to external USB drives.

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by PeterT

...
Heads up, if you run into any problems on later chipsets and and have to use the 'safe' option, contact Acronis and they'll give you a multi-parameter
version of the boot disc. It solved the problem for me. I can use this version of the boot disc on a P45 chipset in 'full' mode and have access to external USB drives.

Thats interesting, I'm still using TI Home 10.0 on a X48 system and I have to use the "safe mode" in order to access my USB and SATA disks if I'm running the bootable CD... and it works fine... actually i usually use the windows environment to do the actual backups and only use the bootable CD for restores. I verify each image and have never had any problems with restores. I also do my own "spot check" by browsing the backups after they're done just to check that I can access files at random.

[XJ.]

First off, no there isn't! But some come close (in a variety of categories)

Having said that, for SOHO I find Acronis True Image 2009 to be excellent - and the customer support seems to be very good as well. I'm glad TI 11 working out for you!