Disk imaging/backup

Can I hear from people who use Acronis for disk cloning and backups as to your experience and rating of the product? I have been using Ghost but it has some problems and I know many people who swear by Acronis, but if you look at user reviews anywhere, like here there is consistent and total polarization - 50% give it 5 stars, 50% 1-star and virtually nothing in between!

This may not be a Sony or Z-specific question, but given the unconventional RAID-0 ssd configuration on the Z, and it's attendant crash risks, how you back up becomes more critical. Ghost works fine for me, but there it has been crashing on me lately and there are other things that Acronis does that Ghost doesn't.

Thanks.

 

I use Windows Home Server for continual incremental backups and the occasional imaging using the native Windows backup facility.

 

for the past 6-7 years I've been using Acronis True Image, no issues at all, working as a charm. I guess it comes down to persona preferences but you should give it a try.

Cheers
Miki

 

Thanks for your advice. I'm sometimes amazed by how little response you get for topics I would have thought were of more interest.

I spoke to a friend who loves Acronis and provided an explanation for the polarized reviews. He said it sometimes acts up, and you have to get creative to fool it back into behaving properly and that if someone was unlucky and it borked in the very beginning, it would be easy to conclude it was junk and just give up on it. Apparently their customer support is not very good, so you can't get good help when things do go wrong, and of course that causes people to lose all confidence.

It's pretty much the "gold standard" in imaging products, from what I can tell. I'll report in, in case anyone is interested.

 

Funny, the reason I went looking for a cloning program (trying Ghost first) was that Windows Backup was stopped working for me. It was doing fine until one day it said it could not finish the backup. It gave me an error message which ties to the Profiles registry items and when I checked mine against what the various Windows forums said it should look like, mine didn't, and I couldn't get it to right itself. Doesn't feel great having it remain and imaging it anyway, but there were a ton of suggestions for getting it to right itself, and I will try to get working on it. But for now everything else is working perfectly, better than ever, and Acronis does a lot of cool things that Windows Backup doesn't. Thanks again for the input.

 

OP, can i ask what sort of problems you ran into when using Ghost?

 

Twice in a row it could not find the image to restore from. Thankfully, I had a fairly recent Windows backup. Ironically, My Z is now not capable of completing a Windows backup. It's apparently not that uncommon and has an error code (don't recall it) which relates to the Profiles in the Registry. Since everything else works fine and, now I can say, Acronis worked perfectly, out of the "box, I'm gonna take a break from a heavy work of fixing computer issues throughout my household and deal with the registry issue, which doesn't seem to effect anything but Windows backups.

The reason I told you that long story is that perhaps that is the reason the Ghost backups would not restore. The Windows backup creates a full backup file and just at the end it says it can't complete it. When I tried restoring what looks like a complete backup, it responded pretty much the way Ghost had when I went looking to replace it. Strange though, afterwards W BU worked once, only, and now Acronis seems fine. Also, FWIW, I've had numerous small glitches with Ghost that always left me feeling a bit queasy about relying on it, though so many do.

 

Acronis seems to be the favourite one out there, but as miki69 says, personal preference plays a big part. I've never had any problems with Acronis, but I much prefer Paragon for cloning. I think it is just better laid out, though speeds are similar, etc. Just a personal thing!

 

Have any of you upgraded to Acronis TIH 2012 yet? NAS backup seems to be the big improvement.

 

Paragon Backup and Recovery (Free) is also worth a look, quite similar to Acronis but not as pretty. Is free though.

 

I'm currently using the native windows backup & restore tool in windows 7, and i am only imaging the system images (copy of all partitions on raid-0). I even decided to delete my partitions just like that one day, and try the tool to see if it will recover my desktop, and *Gasp* to my suprise, it worked flawlessly and I was back into my desktop in under a hour just like I left it. (I ran backup immediately before doing this - so i will not be missing any changes.) I just back everything up in one complete shot to my external USB 3.0 hdd set to backup once every single day. Then that copy is synced to a NAS. It takes like half an hour to backup 100GB so it's not really ideal, but I could live with that since I set it to backup in the late night while i'm docked and not using the laptop.

Ive used acronis and all that before, but after I really think about it, i don't really want all those extra processes running all the time and have to configure all that much.

I would just cloud-sync all my frequently updated files just incase too, so incase a failure occurs right after a long day of work and before a backup, i wouldn't have missed much if anything.

One problem with this native tool though, is it doesn't offer encryption on the archive, and backing up to a bitlocker-to-go partition and then trying to restore from it doesn't work unless the system can access the windows partition and the key is saved and set to automatically unlock on the drive (which is unlikely if your drive c/windows is messed up). So you need to copy the backup folder back out to a non-bitlockered partition/location somewhere and then restore from that.

 

Unabashed Ghost user here. Not sure why your images went missing, but I normally search them out manually anyway.

Acronis works too, just a personal preference or habitual thing.

 

^Another vote here for ghost. Never had an issue and used it a bazillion times.

 

I used Acronis True Image Home 2010 to do image backups on my VAIO Z13 notebook & it seemed to work well for me.

 

I found out why both Windows BU and Ghost started screwing up on me: I got an Iomega 1TB USB3 drive and it has a 'virtual cd' that autoruns and screws up nearly all the backup/imaging programs. Had the same problems with Acronis as with Ghost and Windows. Many, many search results said the Iomega portable drive s--cks because you can't use any system tools to erase the virtual cd partition, but going 4 pages deep in search found that you can remove the virtual CD partition (which is how they install their own encryption sftwe) by simply installing it then invoking an option to eliminate it. Since then, all three work fine. Have to say, Acronis 2012 is pretty slick and has a few features I don't think Ghost has (I know, you want me to name them, and I can't!) But it is incredibly easy to use and very flexible. Ghost may do this too, but Acronis has a restore function much like Windows restore to an earlier date, so if you messed with configuration on a certain day and it stays in your image, you can easily restore from an earlier backup and make bye-bye whatever you did to mess things up without having to go too far back or clean install.

Since I paid my $30 and bought Acronis TI 2012, it's mine, for now. Thanks for the inputs.