Nice review - I use True Image as well, and have been happy with it for the most part. The most glaring weakness right now is the lack of a "Verify Image" capability. According to Acronis, they are working on one, but have no idea when it will be released.
One feature I like about this product that I don't think you mentioned in your review is the ability to map a backup as a drive.
This is very useful if you say, uninstall something that removes a shared file that is critical to another application. You can just open the backup file and copy the file required from the backup file. No need to just re-image.
I don't know if ghost can do that yet. I believe PowerQuest recently came out with a version of their imaging software that does this kind of thing too.
One feature I like about this product that I don't think you mentioned in your review is the ability to map a backup as a drive.
This is very useful if you say, uninstall something that removes a shared file that is critical to another application. You can just open the backup file and copy the file required from the backup file. No need to just re-image.
I don't know if ghost can do that yet. I believe PowerQuest recently came out with a version of their imaging software that does this kind of thing too.
Ghost includes Ghost Explorer which allows you to do the same thing, it also allows you to add/remove from images of FAT32 partitions etc but not NTFS or Disk images. But it doesn't like swapping between CDs/DVDs when loading an image. I have to copy them to the PC to access them :cry:
I don't know if ghost can do that yet. I believe PowerQuest recently came out with a version of their imaging software that does this kind of thing too.
Ghost could do that at least since Ghost 2001. Drive Image can do it as well. Neither one maps a letter drive though. They use their own programs for exploring images.
One drawback I found with Drive Image is that they will not restore a file that is compressed with NTFS. I believe Drive Image will not restore encrypted files either. There is no error message generated. The restore of files seems to go normally but there are no files to be found.
I use ghost and DriveImage at work .. but never needed to access a single file or had it installed - we just use it to create and restore images for test systems.
Despite what you feel about Drive Image, it is a much more full-featured product IMHO. I've been using it for years (since version 4) and have never had a failure. It has two vital elements that the above software lacks: a scheduler and image verification. I have it scheduled to back up my C drive to my D drive, and my D drive to my C drive, after I go to bed. The next day I just burn the images to a DVD RW.
I find Ghost to be a very "iffy" program. It regularly refuses to make an image citing various arcane problems, but Drive Image does the image just fine. I've given up on Ghost.
I use both Ghost and DeployCenter (Enterprise version of Drive Image but much more powerful) here at work but I'll have to check this out as I always image every PC I own religiously.
Despite what you feel about Drive Image, it is a much more full-featured product IMHO. I've been using it for years (since version 4) and have never had a failure. It has two vital elements that the above software lacks: a scheduler and image verification. I have it scheduled to back up my C drive to my D drive, and my D drive to my C drive, after I go to bed. The next day I just burn the images to a DVD RW.
I find Ghost to be a very "iffy" program. It regularly refuses to make an image citing various arcane problems, but Drive Image does the image just fine. I've given up on Ghost.
I agree 100% I've used all three and DriveImage always just works. We use Ghost at work here and I hate it. DriveImage just added the one thing in my mind that is was missing, backing up to a USB HD. I've not tried it out yet, but hope to soon. True Image is nice and works, but I would use Drive Image and Ghost before it.
I believe in hardware, I believe in Raid. Recently I had two 20gig drives left over from other projects, so I changed my work pc, which already had two 20gig drives setup as Raid1 thru a Promise Fasttrak pci card, to a Raid5 using 4 twenty gigabyte drives.
I used WinXP's backup program to create a compressed copy of my files to another machine on my network. Kinda worked, copied the data, kept rebooting due to an invalid Windows configuration until I re-used my XP cd to recover.
I'd like a good backup method, but I've tried one or two programs that had me burning 6 or more CDr disks and continually swapping between disk 6, disk 1, disk 5, disk 1, disk 6, disk 1, disk 4, disk 1.
Iomega is 'spose to come out with something new, 'WHACK'(iron pipe on head)
Sorry, shouldn't mention the 'I' word, but I need a method of inexpensive and reliable high density backup storage. I haven't tried DVDr high-volume backup burning yet, has anyone? I'm wary of finding that the DVD separated or bubbled while in a stored folder and the data is toast.
I've used Ghost many times over a network by Dos boot disk, I've not tried the most recent versions(in the past two years). Occasionally duplicates would get confused, when configuring twenty classroom PCs from the same image with limited number of network 'named' boot disks.
Linux
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