Disk Imaging Woes

I wrote an article in October of last year, in which I said you should backup OR image your PC … either one, but at least do something.

 

At the time I had just used Acronis True Image 8 to restore one of my PCs. And it was great.  Since then I’ve upgraded to 9.  And what a mistake that was!

 

To restore a drive with TI9 you use a boot CD which boots into Linux and then allows you to restore the drive (you can’t restore from Windows because if you booted your PC into Windows your drive would be in use … and locked).  All imaging programs require you to boot by CD or floppy to avoid this.  But when you boot with the CD, TI9 sees external hard drives (which is how I and many users … check the Acronis forums here … back things up), it sees the drive, but every image is corrupt … according to the boot CD.

 

However, if you verify the image from within Windows … it’s fine.  If you hook the drive up to a networked PC and restore over the network … it’s fine (but it takes a lot longer and sometimes you get the old (back as far as TI8) Acronis bug where it asks you to login to the shared drive … even if there’s no password associated with the drive.  And sometimes even if you type a password associated with a user on that PC, it doesn’t recognize it … it just keeps asking over and over again.  Then I have to take the HD and attach it to a different networked PC.   Aaagh!  And that’s not even taking into account that it would normally take about 15 minutes to restore via a USB external drive, and it takes over an hour via the network!

 

I’ve tried older versions of TI9 … and they are worse.  Also, since they now offer “differential” backups, TI8 can’t read the new files.  So I’m stuck.

 

Support has been working with me and acknowledges the problem.  However, I must note they had me jump through hoops to give them info with debugging tools, then told me “I spoke to the developers and they know about this.  They are working on it.”  And just why did I have to do anything to help you then?  If you already knew about it, save me the time and effort and just tell me!

 

They offered me a free product.  Whoopee.  Nothing on their site interests me except True Image.  I am seriously looking into alternatives right now.  I need a solution that works 100% of the time.  More later.