So, I thought I had decided on Paragon Drive Image Professional. But I have changed my mind. Why?
Acronis released True Image Home 9.0.3567. Yep, they are differentiating between Corporate and Home product lines. Does this solve the problem with their product not recognizing my external USB drives? Well, yes … and no.
NO: the Linux version of their Emergency Boot CD continues to fail when trying to use an image on an external drive. Every image, just as before, is said to be corrupt.
YES: Acronis now include’s a BartPE plugin. For those of you who do not know what this is, BartPE is a bootable Windows CD. You can add plugins of all sorts to it. And it’s free.
You just need the BartPE files and a Windows XP CD … with the Acronis plugin and BartPE, I can boot into a CD version of Windows XP, see my external drives and backup and restore to and from them. So the problem is (as I keep telling Acronis) with their Linux implementation.
You can even use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, which builds upon BartPE, if you’d prefer. The reasons to do this is to get better driver support for your boot CD. I’ve successfully added the Acronis plugin to the UBCD and it works.
Why move back in the first place? Well, Acronis has better compression than Paragon. Also, for some reason, Paragon insists on splitting the image into 2GB or less files. Not really a big deal but a mess. Also, I can’t really name the files to names I like without screwing up the image. Finally, Acronis has a comment feature that allows me to place comments in each backup for all the changes in the image.
So, for now at least, I’m back. With the new marketing angle, though, we’ll have to see how long I’m back.
