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

Hey Jack:

For what it's worth, I've been using Acronis TI Home 11 with no problems. However, some older BIOS/motherboards might have recognition issues with USB or SATA drives. Some older mobo BIOS don't handle SATA or USB booting well and need the OS to do the heavy lifting. Are you using a fairly recent motherboard with a recent BIOS? A BIOS update might also help if TI isn't finding all the drives.

But I've been using TI 11, not TI 10, so maybe TI 10 just can't handle more modern (SATA, USB, USBII) drive controllers.

Supposedly TI 11 needs the downloadable "update" to run on Vista. I D/L'd it and have been using that recent version, but I actually ran the pre-update version on Vista without problems. I would think that TI 10 might have been released in the early days of SATA, and back when a lot BIOS/motherboards didn't boot off of SATA (or USB). So maybe an upgrade to a more recent version of Acronis TI might help.

I've restored a few active primary partitions from the TI 11 boot disk without problems, though it does take a while to do the restore. I've also restored a few folders and files now and then from the compressed archives.

Never had a problem with TI 11 restoring an active primary partition image from a local drive except when there was a BIOS issue.

I do incrementals to another drive or two, and every now and then do a fresh normal back up (archive and non-archive-bit-flipped files) to keep the number of increments under control. Now that I think about it, I'm way overdue for one.

TI 11 has worked just fine for me. The only time I've had problems is backing up huge files (video, or multi-track audio) over ethernet -- And I'm 100% sure when that's failed it wasn't due to TI, but some kind of weird network data-write latency bug.

However TI 11 also came with some sort of boot manager software that killed my computer several times. "Boot Magic" or some such thing. It's crap. I once had to do a parallel install to get my computer back after the included (with TI 11) "Boot Magic" killed the MBR. I thought the updated version I downloaded from Acronis would work better, but it did the same freakin' thing. Stay away from that POS boot manager.







"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.

.