Shadow Protect Desktop or Paragon Drive Backup Personal?
louise
interested in the newest Symantec bloatware version.
I want Image Backup ONLY
I'm trying to decide between Shadow Protect Desktop and
Paragon Drive Backup Personal.
I want to be able to restore an entire image to a blank
drive and/or to be able to restore one file from that image
if needed.
My concerns are reliability of the backup image and
reliability of the company behind the product.
I do a full image backup about once every few weeks to one
usb hard drive. I do a file backup every night using
Retrospect to a different hard drive. And - I backup very
important files to mozy.com. I want to keep Retrospect,
although I'll probably upgrade to a newer version, I'm happy
with Mozy - but I need something reliable for my image backups.
Problems I read about with Acronis are leading me to look
elsewhere.
Recommendations - experiences?
TIA
Louise
Wandering
>
> I want Image Backup ONLY
>
>
> I want to be able to restore an entire image to a blank drive and/or to
> be able to restore one file from that image if needed.
>
So you actually want image backup with file backup. Most programs will do
both if they do image, and that includes Acronis
> I do a full image backup about once every few weeks to one usb hard
> drive. I do a file backup every night using Retrospect to a different
> hard drive.
> Problems I read about with Acronis are leading me to look elsewhere.
>
Remember that when you visit a forum it is not filled with people who are
delighted with the program and having no problems. That's no way to judge
a program. And, other then the magazine reviews that are nothing more
than reprints of the software publishers own description, you won't hear
anything very negative there either - it hurts advertising revenue.
Like the other responder, I have been using Acronis for several years,
first in Version 8, and then in Version 11. Twice each week, it runs
automatically, and backs up my Windows Vista partition, my NTFS data
partitions, and my install of Ubuntu. I have successfully recovered from
all these at various times.
There are some minor bugs, but they won't impact what you are doing. The
progress meter is often wrong, but the job completes fine, and the file
can be used to restore the various partitions, or mounted to get single
files or folders.
I don't bother with incremental backups. Disk space is cheap, and I just
let each Wednesday backup overwrite the last Wednesday backup, and so on
rotating through the week and keeping three full backups along the way.
Acronis has lots of additional bells and whistles, and that is where most
of the grief lies.
Just boot on the Acronis trial disk you burn, and if it can see all your
drives, you should do just fine.
Good luck
Howard Kaikow
I got Ghost 10, free after rebates and used it for a while.
I tried a pre-release of True Image 9, it was a disaster!.
A few months later I purchased the retail TI 9, but I installe the latest
update,
instead of from the CD. No problems since, other than an issue that was
exacerbated by having both TI 9 and Ghost 10 concurrenly installed.
As time passed, bugs in Ghost 10 surfaced, so I finally uninstalled Ghost
10.
On my Win 2000 syste, TI 9 has, so far not failed me.
I passed on TI 10.
Of course, as seems to be the case with tI, the early release of TI 10 was
allegedly buggy.
I have purchased two TI 11, one is going on the Vista notebook I purchased
31 May 2008.
Again, the early releases of TI 11 are alleged to be buggy.
I did a trial install on my Win 2000 system of the version on the retai CD
and had no problems.
On the Vista system, I'll install the latest update, not the version on the
CD.
With regard to Shadow Protect.
Some time ago, I tried shadow Protect 2.*, do not recall the vrsion.
Well, it had real problems on my system.
I worked with their tech support and we were able to find a way to reproduce
the very subtle bug.
THey issued an update that included a fix to my problem.
I was quite impressed withe SP tech support, and I kicked them in the butt
and got them to use their tech support forums actively.
I decided to wait for version 3 before installing SP. And, I was given a
free license for SP 3 due to my efforts helping find the bug above.
However, when version 3 was released, guess what, it would not work on my
system.
It is my undedrstanding that others had related problems and this may have
been fixed in SP 3.1.
However, due to other events, I have not had the time to try 3.1.
I am not at all impressed with the Acronis tech support, either in the TI
forum or via email.
My experience would indicate the support at ShadowCraft is superior.
Some time ago, I posted something indicating why I thought tI was better
than Ghost.
See
http://forums.hardwareguys.com/ikonboard.cgi?s=4492619c5fa1ffff;act=ST;f=13;t=4573.
THe same would apply to SP 2, due to the commomality of certain core
software used by Ghost that was actually licensed from Storage Craft.
I know that SP 3 tried to, at least in part, address the issue I raised.
Unfortunately, I've not had the time to check heck, I don't even have the
time to post this message!
And, it took a while before I convinced myself of the reliability of image
based
backups. I cannot think of any reason to use file based backups.
I wrote the following programs to verify things:
http://www.standards.com/index.html?GetDiskSpaceUsed
http://www.standards.com/index.html?ReadFile
http://www.standards.com./index.html?GetFileTypeDistribution
http://www.standards.com./index.html?CompareDrives
And if dates/times get screwed up
http://www.standards.com/index.html?ChangeFileTimes
http://www.standards.com/index.html?ChangePathTimes
and, not yet released