Re: Best PC Backup software? (and trueimage horror story)


"sheetsofsound" <jackzucker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:9ea7147f-fc20-438d-88cc-4f842a412023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Best PC Backup software? (and trueimage horror story)
Just had an awful experience with trueimage home 2009. I've been using
trueimage for several years and have had to restore various computers
5 or 6 times. My backups are on firewire drives and/or usb drives so
the recovery boot cd needs to install the appropriate drivers to see
my spare drives.

Trueimage 9 or 10 (releases prior to trueimage 2009) worked pretty
well but had some bugs that caused me to have to reboot the recovery
cd multiple times for it to see all my drives. Not sure why. The
drives were always powered on and not in sleep mode.

Anyway, a virus trashed my MBR (master boot record) last night and I
went to restore from a Dec 22 backup. The Trueimage home 2009 cd
booted and would get all the way to where it would request the
destination for the restore and would hang. I tried this multiple
times. Using a laptop, I engaged in a chat session with their
technical support. They told me I needed a new recovery CD (different
from the latest release version) and sent me a link to a new ISO image
which I burned into a bootable CD and tried. Same result. The new CD
had various options for starting with and without ACPI and with and
without USB support. Same results. Without USB support the mouse
wouldn't work and their software (linux based) doesn't support
keyboard mode.

Finally, I booted my Trueimage 10 disc. It wouldn't recognize the
trueimage 2009 backup format but I did have a 6 month old backup in
trueimage 10 format so I loaded it.

After a 2 hour restore, the system booted and I installed trueimage
2009 and from windows, started a restore session. The windows restore
creates a script which is run when the system is restarted and upon
restart the system began restoring my dec 22 backup. I started it this
morning before I left for work but I assume I'll be good when I get
home.

SO THE QUESTION IS...

What's a good, lightweight AND RELIABLE package that handles backup/
restore/MBR Recovery, includes a recovery disk option, handles
multiple partitions, various file system types (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, etc)
and doesn't require tons of running services monitoring file changes.
(I prefer to manually perform my backups)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

And by the way, I tried Ghost a couple years ago but it failed to
support multiple bootable partitions and installs itself like a virus.
Uninstalling required manually stopping services, deleting registry
and startup entries, etc.

I just had to reinstall XP The system was becoming very slow and crashing
all the time. I did a fresh install on new hard drive and cloned it to
another. I saved the old drive to recover my data files from as I need them
So I have two drives for my files and two drives for my system and programs
one in the computer one sitting by the side in a hot swap box. So my backup
is multiple copies of the same files on different drives and archives on
dvd.

Bob


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