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| Thread ID: 129798 | 2013-03-14 01:23:00 | Easy backup software - free or paid | wratterus (105) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1332623 | 2013-03-14 01:23:00 | What's good? I'm a bit out of the loop at the moment. Something that can image a whole machine to an external drive on a schedule would be good, what are people using at the moment? Used to use Acronis, but feel that's it's a bit bloated these days. Often use Cobian and that's fine for file backup. |
wratterus (105) | ||
| 1332624 | 2013-03-14 01:50:00 | I use and recommend to customers Active@disk Image (http://www.disk-image.com/) The paid one is the one to use, creates a bootable CD as an option so you can create an image or simply drop the image back onto a new or current drive, it works, even over a LAN, in fact I use it most days in one form or another, only time I've had it fail is when the drive was so bad with dud sectors its a wonder it even imaged at all. Tried a few others like Shadow protect, BUT every time I tried it something went wrong. In fact I was at a persons place a month ago they had used shadow protect and it was saying it was doing backups, but when trying to put any back it wouldn't boot, ended up doing a repair install on the OS then it booted. Acronis -- yuck yuck and double yuck :D |
wainuitech (129) | ||
| 1332625 | 2013-03-14 02:00:00 | Thanks Wainui, that was the one I was trying to think of but couldn't remember the name. I'll download it and have a play - does it do differential/incremental full disk image backups? |
wratterus (105) | ||
| 1332626 | 2013-03-14 02:24:00 | ShadowProtect is awesome, by far the best backup solution I've come across. HIR restores to bare metal are brilliant. | WarNox (8772) | ||
| 1332627 | 2013-03-14 02:32:00 | Macrium Reflect free will do what you want (image with scheduling). I have used it (actually upgraded to paid ver) for years and it has never given a problem. | linw (53) | ||
| 1332628 | 2013-03-14 02:43:00 | ShadowProtect is awesome, by far the best backup solution I've come across. HIR restores to bare metal are brilliant. I wouldn't called failed to be able to recover good. I've had shadow protect fail several times when testing and so have customers who brought it after seeing posts on here - as previously mention. Its amazing how many people think backups are working then when they are required they then find out they are hopeless. Not many people actually test the backups. From trying out many different solutions, Acronis is the worst. |
wainuitech (129) | ||
| 1332629 | 2013-03-14 02:51:00 | ShadowProtect is awesome, by far the best backup solution I've come across. HIR restores to bare metal are brilliant. +1 to that, personally I have not struck the same problems Wainui seems to. Even if you do have problems their support is pretty good. |
Alex B (15479) | ||
| 1332630 | 2013-03-14 03:02:00 | We use ShadowProtect ourselves, IT Edition, which allows us to use it on any machine, PC / server etc. This version costs an arm and a leg but it has paid for itself many times over. We pretty much take a backup image of every machine that comes in the workshop, before doing any major work, just in case something goes wrong. We also take a full backup image of a client's old computer and put this image onto their new machine, restore any required data and leave the backup image there in case there's some other data from the old PC that we missed or they didn't think about at the time. They can use the trial version of SHadowProtect to open and browse the backup image without any limits, it is just limited to 30 days for doing actual backups. We also sell ShadowProtect to clients, for servers or desktops/laptops, and have never had an issue with it. You do need to make sure you set it up correctly and there are some recommendations on how Windows should be configured, page file settings etc, to get the best performance and to know that your backups are reliable. When you install it it runs a diagnostic and will tell you what needs to be done before you start using it. There is also another program, ImageManager, that you can use for free as part of ShadowProtect, which can verify your backup images immediately after the backup has finished and it will also verify them again at regular intervals to make sure the backup images are still in tact and not getting corrupted by a bad backup disc or whatever. You can also use this program to replicate the backups to another device/machine/cloud/FTP etc. (Some of the replication features require a separate license to be purchased) |
CYaBro (73) | ||
| 1332631 | 2013-03-14 04:25:00 | I have successfully instant booted many images, however I'm curious to the page file setting you mentioned? | SolMiester (139) | ||
| 1332632 | 2013-03-14 04:32:00 | I have successfully instant booted many images, however I'm curious to the page file setting you mentioned? Storagecraft recommends that your page file is set to a fixed size at twice the size of the amount of RAM and if possible put it on a separate partition that isn't backed up. You don't actually need the system partition (100MB or 350MB) as part of the backup as ShadowProtect can make the main system partition bootable when doing a restore. When doing the restore SP will do what it needs to the main system partition to make it bootable. |
CYaBro (73) | ||
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