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Acronis True Image

True Image is a Ghost-style program in a sense that it can perform backup and restore by booting from a specially created CD with the custom, proprietary loader. Like Ghost it can resize the NTFS partition on the fly (both shrinking and expanding is possible). You do not need a working OS to restore the image. As Norton Ghost problems demonstrated this is not an easy task. DOS is no longer suitable, flavors of linux are not always compatible with the hardware. True Image is suffering from the same problem.

The forte of this utility lies in the ability to resize NTFS partitions. Products that perform such complex operation as "on the fly" NTFS resizing should not try to be "all things for all people". Ability to reliably resize NTFS partitions, speed and ability to recognize hardware for restore without OS are three requirements that are really important. Everything else is peripheral and should be viewed as such. Too high and/or unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment.

A lot of people who experienced difficulties and gave the product low marks belong to this category. Most have a complex setup. Some want the product to work seamlessly with Ext3 (linux) partitions. Some tried to perform some complex operation without much thought or preparation and were amazed that it failed. I think each second negative review was written by users who were either not well prepared or expect too much from the program.

First of all the installation and burning the CD (or better creating a copy of C-drive on USB drive for future restore operation using "disk clone" capability) should be done on a healthy system. While attempt to save a dying or infected system might succeed, failure in such case is more typical and should not surprise anybody...

Standalone (bootable) restore utility is a weak spot of any Ghost-like utility, so in case of restoration with OS some work should done to make your restore configuration as transparent for True Image as possible. Minimal amount of drives should be connected. For example laptops should taken out of dock and USB drive should be connected directly to laptop port without any hubs. That increases the chances of success. But any program that relies on custom standalone loader works badly without Windows and that's a critical problem of this class of programs. I think this is an irresolvable problem, so you need to find a way to avoid it completely (see below). Fortunately, with cheap USB drives available now this is possible.

The best way to avoid using the standalone loader is to create full copy of the existing C drive on a small USB disk drive (80-120G disk drive usually suffice, which can be bought or assembled for $60-$80) and then do regular backups on a larger (1-2TB) USB drive. In case your computer disk crashes or system became infected or other serious problem with Windows arise, you can boot from this reserve USB drive, load True Image (remember this is a copy of C-drive so True Image is installed) and restore your system partition from the most recent backup without using standalone loader.

If you fail you still can use this bootable copy for some time and have time to simplify your setup and to prepare for a new attempt to restore the image without too much time pressure. This additional ability of bootable UCB drive to alleviate the time pressure is extremely important for success of the restore operation. In my experience the most stupid and most damaging for data blunders were done when I was under time pressure and need working computer "now".

One problem with True Image that I have found is that when I try to create an image of C drive it does not give me an option to perform the operation without rebooting to a specialized standalone loader. That's a blunder in the design of the program. In other words, for C-drive backup it does not uses Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS). This makes some sense as this removes any malware from the memory but as standalone loader is unreliable and always will be unreliable user should be given a choice.  At least it is completely inexcusable in disk copy operation that True Image also provides (see below).

Again as it is inevitable that many users have problems with standalone loader (no matter on which OS it is based, Linux or something else) this is a blunder that need to be corrected. But at least using the trick that I proposed you can avoid using standalone loader when restoring the image.

The function of cloning of disks (hidden in Tools menu) is very useful and works really well for all partitions exact system. For system partition it behaves like the operation of crating an image of system partition and uses a standalone loader. Still it can and should be used for creation of alternative bootable drive on USB drive that I mentioned above. Having such drive is much preferable to bootable CD approach that True Image has.

The product is really fast. It took me less then 30 min to clone 30G of data on 90G system partition on 7200 RPM harddrive on my laptop using regular 7200 RPM USB 2.0 drive as the target. This is approximately three times faster then free partimage utility under Linux (1 hour 20 min for the same drive). I think that backup from solid state drive (for example Intel 80G X25-M G2) to 15K RPM eSCSI drive of the same partition will take less then 10 min which is as close to enterprise backup speed as one can get.

Ability to shut down computer after the backup is a nice little touch. It tells that people who wrote it know something about its typical usage.

All-in-all, the better you are prepared for the disk crash or virus infection that cannot be disinfected by regular antivirus, the simpler is your backup and restore configuration, the better are your chances that True Image can save your day.

The product has excellent compatibility with various version of NTFS (for example it does not require that disk be defragmented before the backup). That is the True Image the strongest point. In way this is a "True Image" of NTFS filesystems.

It's priced approximately the same as antivirus programs and works much better that any of them if you have a clone of your C-drive on USB and the most recent C-drive image.

Old News

By	Hawk521 (North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews

I primarily use Acronis True Image Home 2010 to make image backups of my C: partition on a daily basis. Takes less than 15 minutes to backup to a separate drive. These daily backup images have come in handy for those occassions where I've "experimented" one step too far with new software or O/S tweaks and have managed to introduce problems with my Windows 7 installation. When things go badly I have been able to simply restore to a prior image backup and all my mistakes are reversed. A full image restore of ~25GB of drive C: partition takes about 20-25 minutes.

Of course I also backup my D: drive on a less frequent basis as I seldom have had a need for restoring this drive.

The "incremental" backup option is very nice if you're in a hurry and don't want to take the time to do a full image backup. Acronis does a nice job of 'marrying' the incremental image backup to the prior full backup image to make it virtually transparent when you need to restore from these multiple incremental backups.

Is nice to know that I'm always within a half hour of being at a fully functional system - regardless of how many dumb things I might do to the machine. :)

By

KD "KD"

In the past, I had been using Ghost 2003 (DOS boot floppy) -- which I considered one of the best pieces of software ever created. I never bothered with the actual Window's Ghost 2003 install, other than simply just to create a boot floppy. Once I had a working boot floppy, I uninstalled the Window's Ghost 2003. My preferred method of doing backups is very simply. I simply want to boot into the backup program externally from any installed OS and manually perform backup/restores with an external USB HDD. I have no desire for automated backups. In the past, Ghost 2003 (DOS boot floppy) worked faithfully for me over many years covering (32bit) Win98, Win2000, WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD, and even Vista. While in recent years, I would have to manually repair the MBR and bootloaders after restores with Ghost 2003, it still remained an excellent program. Unfortunately, with the arrival of mainstream 64bit hardware, Ghost 2003 is now obsolete. Even more unfortunate is that Symantec, after borging PowerQuest, completely changed Ghost after 2003. Usually Symantec destroys any product that they acquire, but in this case they destroyed their own product (Ghost) after acquiring PowerQuest DriveImage -- which, just like PowerQuest PartitionMagic, was also an excellent product in it's own right before being borged by Symantec.

After quite a bit of work, I was actually able to get Ghost 2003 to recognize an internal SATA drive, boot from a USB pen drive, and "work" with 64bit hardware, but there were still a few things going "weird". Read the wikipedia Ghost article on how to get all that going if you want to give it a try.

What I am after is likely very common for what many others are after. I simply want to boot up into a backup program from an external source (CD/DVD, USB drive) and be able to do both backup and restores between an internal HDD and an external USB HDD. I don't even want a "main" backup program to have to be installed on an OS. I don't need nor even want automated backups. I certainly don't want the backup program creating any special "recovery partition" on the internal HDD. I just want a simple, and more importantly: reliable, completely external backup/restore solution.

So, my journey to find a replacement for Ghost 2003 has started. After trying out the trials, this is what I have found so far:

Most of the backup programs are finding themselves using the least-common-denominator approach these days, which I find to be quite troubling.

- Ghost (latest version). Absolute complete rubbish. By "simplifying" everything, they have made it more complicated than needs be. Not to mention that my first attempt to install this program resulted in a hang. I had to uninstall and reinstall it. That definitely doesn't start out with much confidence. Ghost no longer allows for the creation of "boot media". Like most other backup programs, you now can only create "recovery media". This is boot media that allows you to do restores, but doesn't allow you to do backups. To do backups, you must run the main Window's Ghost program from an actual installed OS. I find this recent trend to be really, really, really, stupid.

- Acronis TrueImage. Installed fine. Does the "recovery media" allow you to do both backups and restores? I couldn't get the "recovery media" to even work. TI has a bunch of automated backup features, all of which I could care less about. I had two MAJOR problems with TI, however. The first problem is that it did not allow a backup image to be created of my /entire/ HDD (containing multiple OS's). I would have to backup each partition individually. This is inexcusable. I want the option to be able to backup my entire HDD into one image. I want every single bit off the HDD in that image, the MBR and everything. I don't want to have fix MBRs, bootloaders, fstab's, etc, after doing restores. My second major problem with TI is that I could not get the "recovery media" to boot. It hangs after the initial splash screen, with a blinking CAPS LOCK key. I believe it may be a SATA issue, however there has been little response to others with the same problem on Acronis's support forums. This was simply too troublesome for me to continue using TI. I had no confidence with TI. My two stars for TI is because "I didn't like it", obviously because the "recovery media" didn't even work for me.

- Macrium Reflect Free Edition. This is what I finally settled on for now. It works and works rather well, but like Ghost, the "recovery media" only allows for restores. Again, you have to actually be in Windows and running the main program to do backups. However, on the plus side, it does allow the entire HDD (with multiple OS's) to be backed up into a single image. It backed up everything: Vista, XP, Linux, Swap, FreeBSD. I was able to collect enough courage to try out a restore and it went without a hitch. I also made a backup of just the Vista partition, out of caution that I (unlikely) may want to fallback to Vista after the free Win7 upgrade arrives from Toshiba. I'm happy with Macrium Reflect (especially since it is free), but still would like to have the completely external approach. The "recovery media" runs in a Linux environment and loads a little on the slow side, however works well once it is loaded.

- FarStone DriveClone Express. This one seems to be exactly what I am after, however there are no trials to try it out. Willing to take a chance on it and spend the $32 (google for promo). If I do, I'll update this after giving it a spin.

- NTFS Active Boot Disk. This one not only also seemed to be exactly what I was after, but also seemed to really have potential. After downloading and trying out the trial, I am impressed with it for the most part. The actual installed program is simply to create boot media, either on a CD/DVD or on a USB drive. While it may be possible to get the other backup programs' boot media onto a USB drive, I really like how NTFS Active Boot Disk thought out to do it for you. Everything is done from the boot media: backups and restores. There are also quite a few other handy utilities on the boot media. I was able to not only backup the entire HDD (with multiple OS's) into one image, but also individual partitions. If the OS filesytem isn't natively supported by Active Boot Disk, you can still backup as a raw image. This means that this backup program will work with /everything/. The boot media runs in a WinPE environment and loads quickly. The downside on this program is that it is relatively expensive when compared with the others. I really like being able to do everything externally and also boot up from a USB drive on my keychain. Edit add: Now that I have used this program more, I am finding a few rough edges. I have yet to try doing a HDD restore, but I have been doing USB drive restores (which it also supports). The first attempt to restore a USB drive from an image always results in a (-5) error when it attempts to write the partition table, however it works fine on the second attempt. Also some of the WinPE utilities (i.e., File Explorer) give an error when deleting files. This may be from WinPE itself and not necessarily the Active Boot programs. While you can successfully do everything that this program is designed for, some things are needing a little "hand holding" and coercion. I feel as if Active Boot Disk and WinPE could use a little more polish.

Summary: It is unfortunate that there is no longer a single utility out there that simply just works extremely well. I'm finding this problem not only with backup programs, but also other utility programs of recent years. I feel as if software has taken a down turn over the last few years. Programs seem to be "dumbed down" these days and also released before they are fully polished. Try out several backup programs before you commit to one of them. While TrueImage didn't work for me, it may work for you. Give Macrium Reflect Free Edition a try. Many will likely find that this program does everything that need and does it well. Best of all, it is free. If you are like me in that you want a completely external approach to doing manual backups and restores, take a look at NTFS Active Boot Disk and look for reviews for FarStone DriveClone Express.