Acronis True Image Home 11

This was offered on here for a discount to members awhile back. I bought it, but havent tried to use it. I am wondering if anyone has used it and how it performed for them. I am a total noob and have been trying to find something to do a complete backupo of my system, then weekly updates to the backup. I opened Acronis once, then stopped it to ask advice first.. it said it was shutting down.. but just hung like that for a long time. I used task manager to end the program. My set up is two HHd's in RAID 0, ( 500GB each ) and a third drive on its own ( 1 TB ) I was going to do a complete backup onto the third drive. Any suggestions?

Well, out of desperation, I started running the app, and just as it was going to finish, it said it couldnt read a sector, so it said one of my drives is failing. This system has a diagnostic that runs weekly, and have had no errors before.. not until I ran True Image 11. Any ideas of how to test the drives in RAID 0?

My suggestion would be try Paragon Drive Backup Express. It's free. It's the equivalent of Paragon Drive Backup Personal 9.0 with a few features missing, like folder exclusion and data-only backup. But for just a disaster recovery image it should be fine. Drive backup claims to support RAID. I've never tried Acronis, but I've had Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 and now 9.0 Personal editions and they've bailed me out a bunch of times. I tried the W7 beta and when done playing, I just laid the Vista image I saved back on. Everything was just like when I saved it. Seems very reliable to me.

To get the express edition you have to fill out a form and they mail you an ID and Serial to register and info to log on to download. But you can use a hotmail account no problem. Plus there is an Express edition for Vista 64 bit. Good software. The backup program is wizard-based and easy to use. I've done maybe 4 or 5 restores and never had a problem(I use USB external drives for the backup image sets.) To recover you plug in your external USB drive, put in the boot CD and boot it up. Select the restore set from the recovery program. All mouse driven and easy to use.

To help get the answer to the question you asked - Look here - Acronis True Image Product Line - Wilders Security Forums. I myself am not familiar with RAID setups.

Rather than getting side-tracked testing drives that work, try the backup that professes RAID support. If it creates a backup set without reporting an error, chances are excellent the restore will work.

Different software tends to work better or worse on different hardware. Even though a lot of clones are PC compatible they aren't identical. When I buy low level tools I try to find out by looking on customer forums, which tool seems to have the least problems with hardware most similar to mine. You'll always get a few reports but if you see a forum with a lot of unsolved cases that sound a lot like your hardware setup it may be a clue that something else may work better for you.

That same product may work better on slightly different hardware. It's what works for you is what you need. Does you no good if it works great for some other guy. You're the one with the broken system, not him.

Hi all and thanks for the responses... heres the update. Since the machine is still under extended warranty, I did the tech support dance with HP, and I ran a few self tests from the bios, diagnosing the two drives that make up the RAID configuartion, one fails pretty quickly, the other takes alot longer, but does eventually fail the read part of the extended test.. so HP is gonna replace the two drives and restore the system to factory...heres my newest dilema..
I dont have a USB external drive.. as I did let Acronis run a complete backup, ignoring the bad sectors...I stored this on my third drive.. ( not in RAID configuration ) I'm now wondering if the Image it made is any good, seeing that theres bad sectors on the RAID drives it was copied from. I may just have to start from scratch and start trying to find everything to reload.
I was seriously wanting to take the drives OUT of RAID 0 , but this being an HP machine, it only lets you make a Factory Image, they Dont give you the OS disks.. so.. in order to wipe the drives, take it out of RAID configuration, I'd need a Vista 64 home premium OS to reinstall using my serial number I guess??? Well, lesson learned on RAID here.. now its back to ground zero.... Thanks for the prgram link, I'll check it out. I'm sure I'll have other questions as I go through this crap. I'm off to start taking out my all the goodies i put in this thing.

Blaydrnnnr I have some more info. I tried W7 64 bit beta on my HP system, figuring if I want to take it off I have a backup image. On my HP Pavilion m8000n, the restore operation from an external USB takes 45 minutes to an hour. But because my m9515y has RAID, it needs the Windows driver to work correctly. So when I boot the Paragon Restore CD based on Linux, guess what? I have to restore using "reduced graphics safe mode" which has to run overnight. I can't even use the Backup Capsule feature of the Paragon to create a backup image on a separate partition. This RAID just stymies at every turn.

So now the only avenue that seems like it might produce some results is to create a bootable external USB, if possible, so that I can boot from it and restore from there. It's really a nightmare. I don't understand why they put together a machine configured with RAID that only has one HD!!! Give me a break!!

I never really had any luck with any of the conventional backup software with my new(ish) system. I do like to always have a recent backup of my sytem so I went on a hunt.

The software I use now and recommend to anyone who wants a fast backup without much hassle is Clonezilla! This solution has worked great for me and find it too be much faster and more dependable then anything I have tried.

MilesAhead said:

My suggestion would be try Paragon Drive Backup Express. It's free. It's the equivalent of Paragon Drive Backup Personal 9.0 with a few features missing, like folder exclusion and data-only backup. But for just a disaster recovery image it should be fine. Drive backup claims to support RAID. I've never tried Acronis, but I've had Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 and now 9.0 Personal editions and they've bailed me out a bunch of times. I tried the W7 beta and when done playing, I just laid the Vista image I saved back on. Everything was just like when I saved it. Seems very reliable to me.

To get the express edition you have to fill out a form and they mail you an ID and Serial to register and info to log on to download. But you can use a hotmail account no problem. Plus there is an Express edition for Vista 64 bit. Good software. The backup program is wizard-based and easy to use. I've done maybe 4 or 5 restores and never had a problem(I use USB external drives for the backup image sets.) To recover you plug in your external USB drive, put in the boot CD and boot it up. Select the restore set from the recovery program. All mouse driven and easy to use.

Click to expand...

Ok so if i use paragon Drive backup, should i back up my hard drive and put the image to any other hard drive? or i can use the same drive to back up my C drive?

corbintechboy said:

I never really had any luck with any of the conventional backup software with my new(ish) system. I do like to always have a recent backup of my sytem so I went on a hunt.

The software I use now and recommend to anyone who wants a fast backup without much hassle is Clonezilla! This solution has worked great for me and find it too be much faster and more dependable then anything I have tried.

Click to expand...

I must agree, Paragon never worked on my system nor did any other commercial back-up software. I use MS Sync Toys, ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&DisplayLang=en )very fast and highly efficient and easy to use. Never looked back since.

Bernard

bgowers said:

I must agree, Paragon never worked on my system nor did any other commercial back-up software. I use MS Sync Toys, ( Download details: SyncToy v2.0 )very fast and highly efficient and easy to use. Never looked back since.

Bernard

Click to expand...

Hmmmm....does sync toy backup your entire hard drive???

Download details: SyncToy v2.0

@dinesh the first thing I would do is create the rescue CD and boot it. See if you can enter Normal mode(top choice on the menu) and navigate your internal and external drives easily. If the hardware doesn't seem to have any issues then the rest is up to you. You can create a backup capsule, put a backup set on an external drive, whatever. But you can't restore to the system partition running software off it(I'm talking complete image restore not some file restore) so for disaster recovery you need to think in terms of the rescue CD and independent storage. For example I have a USB I leave hooked up all the time, but I have another that's never hooked up except when I do the backups and restores so some virus can't jump over the network to all the mapped drives.

There are Paragon user forums you can use for advice.

sygnus21 said:

bgowers said:

I must agree, Paragon never worked on my system nor did any other commercial back-up software. I use MS Sync Toys, ( Download details: SyncToy v2.0 )very fast and highly efficient and easy to use. Never looked back since.

Bernard

Click to expand...

Hmmmm....does sync toy backup your entire hard drive???

Download details: SyncToy v2.0

Click to expand...

Heh heh. One freebie I did find while messing with these backups is RichCopy from MS. Even on my system where the Paragon works well, I found out that if you have a large tree of files you want to exclude, it excludes them individually. So the exclusion process can take longer than the backup. This RichCopy is multi-threaded and starts copying right away. So you can move a huge clump of junk to an external before doing your backup. I put on W7 beta with a Custom install and my Windows.old had like 206,000 files/folders in it. RichCopy copied them over the network in less than 1/2 an hour(gigabit network) and then I could delete 'em off before running the backup. btw the download isn't named RichCopy you have too google and there's a blog about it with the link.

Macrium Reflect seems like a good freebie too but it's the same dilemma. If you need a Windows driver to work the HD then you need to use a Windows-based boot CD. So again it's back to buying the commercial version. If you have standard Sata Marcrium claims to have network support even in the free version.

I haven't tried it yet, just installed it, because I want to get my 64 bit system to a point where I can restore in a short time.

btw for quick and dirty file backup, FreeCommander has a pretty nice SyncFolders feature. You get a folder in each Pane and click the compare and you can set it to include all subfolders. It pops up a list showing you which files will copy where and if they will overwrite before you execute the sync. It can sync in both directions simultaneously or you can set it to only go right to left or left to right.

sygnus21 said:

bgowers said:

I must agree, Paragon never worked on my system nor did any other commercial back-up software. I use MS Sync Toys, ( Download details: SyncToy v2.0 )very fast and highly efficient and easy to use. Never looked back since.

Bernard

Click to expand...

Hmmmm....does sync toy backup your entire hard drive???

Download details: SyncToy v2.0

Click to expand...

I can't be sure, I have not tried that. I exclude system files from the synchronisation. A re-install of Vista and then an 'Echo' the opposite way works very well for me.

Bernard

bgowers said:

sygnus21 said:

bgowers said:

I must agree, Paragon never worked on my system nor did any other commercial back-up software. I use MS Sync Toys, ( Download details: SyncToy v2.0 )very fast and highly efficient and easy to use. Never looked back since.

Bernard

Click to expand...

Hmmmm....does sync toy backup your entire hard drive???

Download details: SyncToy v2.0

Click to expand...

I can't be sure, I have not tried that. I exclude system files from the synchronisation. A re-install of Vista and then an 'Echo' the opposite way works very well for me.

Bernard

Click to expand...

To answer the question... no, you can't use Sync Toy backup (clone) an entire hard drive.