It’s been a long time since I’ve written, for various reasons. In the meantime, I’ve had plenty of time to go over my various imaging alternatives and, at least for now, have come to a decision.
I’ve chosen Paragon Software Group’s Drive Image Professional. Why, when I wasn’t too happy with it earlier? Well, for one thing, despite the fact that it’s UI and usability leaves a lot to be desired (meaning I had a heck of a time figuring out how to do things, but once I did, I could indeed do them), Secondly, they had a 50% off sale, which really reduced the price to an affordable level. Also, no activation. And finally, while testing it, I had an unrelated crash which required me to restore from image. Since my most recent image was with Drive Image Professional, I opted to restore from that. Despite the fact that this product is really a heck of a lot slower than TI9, it did the job, and had no problem booting from CD and recognizing my external USB drives.
I also noticed they have not updated the product since they released it. This is far different from TI9, which has been updated > 10 times, I think. This shows me they have a much better level of testing than Acronis does, and gives me a high level of confidence in them.
Interestingly, I pinged Acronis, they told me they had a new “beta” for me to try. I said I didn’t want to go through the effort of installing the product and then creating a boot CD. My problem has been with the boot CD not recognizing my USB drives, so why not just send me an ISO image. They said fine, but it would take a week or so (why? they have the product; just burn a CD and create an ISO. Easy for them, they already have it installed. I just didn’t want to install the product, then uninstall it later if (when?) it didn’t work). Of course, I have not received the ISO image, 1 1/2 weeks later.
I’ll keep TI9 around (at least the boot CDs) in case I need to restore an older image, but going forward, I’ll be using Drive Image Professional.
