Is Acronis TrueImage still the daddy?
Community Forums/General Help/Is Acronis TrueImage still the daddy?
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| Just coming to the end of yet another epic OS reinstall. I say this every time but this time, I really really mean it. I am going to get some drive imaging software. Thinking about Acronis. Is it the best for the job? I have a 120GB SSD as my main drive, with a 500GB internal drive (HDD) for backups and junk and stuff, so I guess my drive image would go on there. How easy/hard is it to restore my system from a backup? What's the process? Does it spit out a bootable recovery CD or some such? Oh, and I take it I can do incremental updates to the stored drive image without having to redo the whole lot every time (which would be very time-consuming). |
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| Yeah, it can still trade blows to the head with a sock-slung 8 ball. Very easy to restore from a backup- boot from the CD, few clicks, *BOSH*. It does incremental backups but I have never used that function. I've used it with XP, Vista and 7. If you are using Win8, I would ask someone who has used it with that before you purchase. |
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| Nah, Win7 Ultimate. This boot CD - where's that come from? |
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| Paragon Hard Disk Manager works well. There is a demo/trial version. |
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| The last Acronis version I used , you could create a boot cd from within the software. It is pretty much the best out there and its compression is very good (if you set it to maximum) ... however I switched to R-Drive Image ... it does everything I want and is not bloated ... |
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| FWIW: Windows itself can also do drive images out of the box: windows Backup creates a drive image, and allows you to generate a rescue CD as well which can be used to boot from and restore the image backup. Backup can either be written to a blank drive or partition, or persionally I find it easier to write to a shared networked folder somewhere which doesn't need to be blank. Under windows 7 it's called 'windows backup', and on windows 8 you can find it in the control panel under 'windows 7 file recovery' -> create system image. That said, Acronis has some nice features such as universal restore which allows you to do a platform-neutral restore of your machine in case you need to restore to (very) different hardware. The windows system image itself will restore as-is, which could potentially blue-screen on dissimilar hardware. |
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| Oh -- and before I forget: The windows backup has another nice feature: The backup image file it creates is a standard .VHD or .VHDX virtual hard drive file. That means that you can attach/mount the file directly in windows disk management and assign a drive letter to it, which allows you to browse your backup in explorer, and easily copy, run or view your files. |
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| I just tried Acronis. Did a backup of 90GB of data very quickly, and stored it at under 30GB. Burned a recovery CD, no problems. Booted from the recovery CD to test it out, it booted, but the mouse won't move. My mouse is on (the light under is it... er... lit), but I can't move the pointer. Tried all the USB ports with the same result. All USB support in BIOS is enabled. I can muddle my way around with the keyboard, but when I get as far as doing an actual restore, it won't let me do that via the keyboard either. Select the backup file, hit Enter, nothing! Pain in the ass, won't be buying Acronis. I'm just glad I found out now, rather than when I REALLY needed it to work. |
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| Make sure you didn't select anything with (SAFE MODE) in the title from the menu- this will kill the mouse. |
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| No, I left everything on its default setting. |
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| OK, had another look around and it's still not playing ball. I've decided that is it not "the daddy". It's more like that creepy uncle you only ever meet at family weddings and funerals. Not for me. |
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| For the mouse you work properly, you may need to enable Legacy USB mode in the BIOS. |
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