Acronis True Image Alternatives

DeaconFrost said:

I care about the speed when restoring an image from a server or external drive. I never have and never will run an imaging program that's installed on the system. I feel like that's trying to change the oil of a car while driving it on a highway. I prefer to do my imaging from outside the OS, so that's why I want it to be bootable from USB. Acronis works, but it frequently changes it's time remaining. A typical laptop for us can take 20 minutes or 2 hours...or anywhere in between, despite coming from the same drive and having roughly the same amount of data.

When I'm trying to crank out laptops, two hours is a big difference compared to twenty minutes.

I think you are just making your life more complicated. But to each their own.

whs said:

I think you are just making your life more complicated. But to each their own.

How so? Is there a step I can skip in that process?

cereberus said:

Also the assertion that it is better to boot outside of windows to backup, is really outdated,

That's good to know, but is there a better way to handle my methods? I prefer wiping the drives clean to ensure all the Dell pre-installed junk is removed. Seems like that would take long to manually install the OS, then Macrium to pull down an image.

DeaconFrost said:

How so? Is there a step I can skip in that process?

For one you should install the imaging program so that you can image in the background. Nothing bad will happen because the imaging program freezes the image at the beginning.

Hi there

slightly OT but also important so I hope the OP doesn't mind.

All you guys with things like NAS boxes etc -- how do you back those up, what program would you use and what do you back them up to --it's quite common for these systems to have 12 TB of storage or so -- or do you simply rely on RAID etc so your HDD's will never (???) lose data.

Since the HDD's are usually swappable a replacement server if it gets damaged isn't an issue as you can replace the HDD's into the new one but what about loss of the entire server plus HDD's due perhaps to Fire / theft / flood etc. The small Microervers are actually quite desirable and potentially very stealable -- I've carried one on a public Bus so they are portable (reasonably).

A faulty HDD in a decent RAID array can be replaced usually without losing data but I'm still sure these systems should be backed up in some way or other.

I'm sure you won't ne using cloud servers for 12 TB of backup - especially from HOME systems - however fast your internet speed is.

Cheers
jimbo

whs said:

For one you should install the imaging program so that you can image in the background. Nothing bad will happen because the imaging program freezes the image at the beginning.

That's the part I'm confused about. Why would I want to install it on a computer that is right out of the box with the OEM image? How would the installed software pull down and restore an image on a drive that needs to be wiped clean?

jimbo45 said:

All you guys with things like NAS boxes etc -- how do you back those up, what program would you use and what do you back them up to --it's quite common for these systems to have 12 TB of storage or so -- or do you simply rely on RAID etc so your HDD's will never (???) lose data.

I have a 6 TB NAS at home, and I back up all the data on it to external drives or cloud services. Much of our content is digital photos, so we store them in a Zenfolio account ($50 annually). Disc images and software are copied to an external 2 TB drive. RAID is great for keeping data online and available, but there's an old saying...RAID is not a backup. RAID doesn't protect you from file deletions or overwrites, so RAID alone isn't enough to truly make your data safe.

Hi there

I think a few external 3TB USB 3self powered passport disks might be fine -- mainly concerned with Music files - ripping 2,000 or more CD's again and re-tagging all those tracks wouldn't be fun (even if I had all those CD's working without errors etc). These small USB drives might be OK also for Video backups (photos etc -- I like decent photos not hideous mobile phone "snapshots". I like printing to A3 at times so quite large photoshop files.

The server seems to be able to write to these USB3 disks at a reasonable speed -- around 110 MBs which should only take a couple of hours for a decent wodge of data - this type of data also doesn't change much so once you've got another copy away from the server it's fine.

My User data is (email etc) is backed up from a laptop to the NAS so I already have two copies. My query was about stuff you only have on the NAS - I think currently a few decent small external USB 3 HDD's will suffice. In the future though who knows. !!! A few years ago I'd have thought the idea of even a 250GB HDD was totally bonkers !! now people regard those size HDD's with about the same expression as looking at a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive . !!

Cheers
jimbo

OldMike65 said:

Then maybe you should not make comments on what Macrium Reflect can or Can't do, if you don't know much about the program. It has changed a lot I guess since you used it last.

Hi there.

Tested V6.

Version 6 IMO has REGRESSED since V5.

The latest V6 the Stand alone bootable version now uses a cludge of WINPE which is initially built from the drivers existing on the machine you created it from -- could be a bit problematical if copying an image to a new machine with say a different network card and you need to recover the image stored on a remote machine.

The older versions used to have a Linux based OS (like acronis) --very fast boot and loads of generic drivers so it would nearly always find remote machines etc.


Another problem with the WINPE interface - it goes Bonkers if you have storage spaces on your machine.

So Macrium "I'm outta here".

At least I did test it - and I'd suggest they bring back the Linux based stand alone version like they used to have in V5.

(@ everybody -- pretty well all the bootable restore programs work with a Linux interface rather than WINPE- this ensures that no proprietary stuff is used (Windows) and the GUI was always designed that most people used these programs such as Acronis or Paragon for example without even realizing they were Linux based. These programs of course handle nearly all sorts of partition types and image formats when used as a stand alone imaging / bare metal restore program).

Winpe based solutions usually take a lot longer to boot as well as they have to build the windows environment each time they are loaded.

This option now no longer exists in V6 when creating a stand alone bootable rescue version. As for supporting a wider range of hardware than Linux - well that's real high quality "Bovine Scatology". !!



Cheers

jimbo