Acronis TrueImage Home - Backup Software

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I tried Acronis TrueImage a couple of years ago - it had a lot of problems then, and judging by their forum, I wasn't alone in having them. One of the big issues was the boot record modification for the auto-recover feature. Users found that if they uninstalled TrueImage, the Windows installation was hosed as well.

Steve Gibson put me on to Drive Snapshot, a blindingly fast, easy to use, and cheap, disk imaging utility for making full and differential backups. I run it using the Window's scheduler once a day; a differential backup of my 500GB system drive takes less than 10 minutes including verification. Combined with a bootable BartPE Windows CD I've always been able to recover from a disk or Windows installation failure.

For data, and yes, I separate my data storage from my OS and program files, most compression utilities these days come with excellent backup features. I recommend 7-Zip, available for free on SourceForge. It's fast, easy to setup, very flexible, and handles "genourmous" files.

I've found the combination of Drive Snapshot and 7-Zip very easy to use at a fraction of the cost of the Acronis applications.

I had Acronis True Image 10 and have upgraded to Ver. 11. I have an external Maxtor disk and keep about three full-disk backups. My problem?, I have never had a failure where I had to restore from the backup; however, I hear many tales of problems with restoring backups and all I can do is 'cross-my-fingers' and hope it works when/if I need it!

I disagree with the concept of backing up Windows while it is running. You wouldn't backup a Word document while you are in the middle of editing it with Word. Acronis may be a great product and be able to do this, but it's an error prone thing to attempt. I prefer the easier-to-program approach of backing up Windows while it is not running, that is, from a bootable CD. This is, however, more work. To each his own.

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While I totally understand the concern, I'm approaching it
from a much more practical nature: the harder you make it,
the less likely average folks are actually going to do it.
Having to remember to take manual steps, particularly
rebooting a couple of times, is a huge barrier.

In my experience Acronis actually does a fairly impressive
job at this. (I'm certain it's not the only one, but it's
the one I have experience with.) The bare-metal restores (a
complete restoration of the machine image) I've performed
have all worked exactly as expected.

I have seen Acronis fail a backup because things were "in
use". My belief is that there may still be a few situations
that it cannot handle safely, in which case it takes the
safer of two evils, fails the backup and at least notifies.
But it's rare (and might have even been a bug in ATI 10).

But in my opinion the imporance of actually backing up
regularly - and that means not having to think about it in
most cases - outwieghs what appears to be a very, very small
risk, if it's an actual risk at all.

Leo

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I did recently have to restore a backup of an acronis image. The image had to be on the hard drive (not the externally connected USB drive where I store a few images. But other than that, it went flawlessly.
I've been using Acronis TI for quite a number of years, and like the program. (I used to use Drive Image, and that was harder to use. )
Susan

Hello Leo,

I've purchased Acronis TIH based on your previous recommendations. Though the SW itself is good, I have one issue (which I spent a week discussing with Acronis support, but that didn't resolve it): I have an external USB drive but I'm not using it for backing up (I have an extra SATA drive for backups). But the USB drive sometimes does not get recognized by the OS after waking up from hibernation. This in turn causes the Acronis to fail on the startup even though the drive isn't really used by Acronis. The reason for this is that Acronis checks all of the disks before running the backup job. This is kind of a killer for me, since I cannot leave it to do its job without my intervention. I would like to be able to turn this disk checking off, but this isn't possible in the current Acronis TIH version.

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Susan: in my case ATI did recognize my external USB drive,
and I've restored directly from that. My guess is that it
has to do with the age of and/or USB support in the
machine's BIOS, but I could be wrong.

Leo

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Igor: it's a little unclear, I can't tell if you're
attempting to backup that external drive or not.

If you are my recommendation would be to set up two separate
backup jobs, one for it specifically that can fail when it's
not around, and another for "everything else" that should
presumably keep working.

Leo

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Leo,

I'm not attempting to back the USB drive nor am I using it for storing backups. The problem is that the Acronis TIH checks ALL drives before it starts running backup jobs and it somehow "remembers" that I have an USB drive and tries to check it, even though it's not used in backups. Then it falsely reports "bad sectors" for it and doesn't want to continue with the job.

The original "sinner" is Windows, which sometimes doesn't recognize the drive when returning from hibernation. But Acronis options should be flexible enough to be able disable drive checking.

I have been using TI for years and it has saved me lots of grief on numerous occasions.

I do an incremental every night and once a week start over with a full image and then incremental for a week.

The Clone option is also a good idea.
You can clone your C drive to an internal hard drive and if your C drive fails then all you have to do is physically switch the drives or cable and boot up and your back up and running in minutes and then you can replace your disk that failed at a later time.

For those not familiar with that familiar, it just makes your second hard drive another C drive.

http://www.domdedomdom.com/

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