Ghost vs Acronis

[gizmocat]

I've used Norton Ghost a lot previously, but not for couple of years now, so not up to speed on the latest version, I'm looking to get myself a new imaging/backup solution. I'm reading more and more about Acronis being a very good product. As I've never used Acronis, I'd be interested to hear from anyone who is familiar with both products, which one they think is superior.

Any comments / observations will be read intently

Cheers
Giz

[izod tester]

Haven't used either for years. I use partimage which is a Linux console application. It can back up partitions or complete drives either to another local hard drive or usb stick or to a network drive. It is completely agnostic about what file system is on the partition being backed up

Download System Rescue CD from Distrowatch and give it a try. If you like it it is possible to create a usb stick version which loads and works faster than the cd version and you can use a separate partition on the usb stick for the backed up image.

[gizmocat]

Cheers for that mate. The reason Acronis is becoming appealing to me is not just the imaging side but it also seems to be quite good as a general incremental / differential file backup solution. (Think BackupExec). All this in one package for under 50 squids, I'm just wondering if there are any "gotchas"

P.S.I'm quite happy using Linux, in fact my Knoppix disk has got a lot of my friends boxes out of trouble when I've been asked to sort them out.

[Deaf Tortoise]

I can't comment on Ghost, but I am using Acronis at the moment (Home version 10.0) and it is simple and friendly.
It can do full or incremental, and works just fine.

P.S. I am on windows XP if that makes a difference.

[Parapunter]

Acronis here too. Dug me out of a hole when I borked my oem copy of Vista. Fired it up & back in business. The incremental backups are good. Big though, 50-60gb for me. I schedule one a week & delete the old one each time.

[HandyAndy]

Been using ATI for a couple of years and not let me down yet. The discussion forum is here - people are mainly asking about problems but there are interesting discussions on there too. I use V.11 build 8101.
Haven't felt the need to upgrade to V.12 (2009).

[Tosh McCaber]

Side by side review:

Gizmo's - Review: Acronis True Image vs Symantec Ghost | Gizmo's Freeware

[Bushfiva]

I use Acronis having moved from Partition Magic. Whichever product you go with, test the rescue media before you need to use it in anger. I have a rescue USB thumbdrive glued to the case which I know will boot the system and locate the backup media, wherever I am.

For imaging, you might check out Easeus which is a Partition Magic clone, and free for home use.

Comodo Backup is a free backup program which has some nice features, including real-time backup, but like other Comodo stuff it's not as polished as the company thinks it is.

[Guest 112233]

Being Serious for a change

Hello All. CATIII has been an Acronis V8 user under MS Windows ME and various flavours of XP (Pro, SP2, SP3 Etc) for the last five/Six years. and a user of Norton Products in various forms for the last 15 Years or so. I cannot vouch for later Vers > 8 of Acronis and I have no connection with the company. The program when installed properly and tested (please see the Gizmo article linked to earlier ) has got me out of the Dunnie on several occasions - including a virus attack where the MBR was trashed by the writing of Random data all through the MBR.
Please read the latter half of the Gizmo article about verifying and testing your software and backups -You WILL need to use backup software of some type for REAL at some time; usually when you least expect to.I have found Acronis support to be very good and Symantic's less useful in my experence. The only drawback with ACRONIS what I know of; was historically; support for mirrored drive systems (RAID) - someone better informed than me, will I hope; post to the thread on this issue.

Thanks everyone

CAT III

[gizmocat]

Thanks for all the replies and info chaps. Excellent article Tosh, many thanks.

That's got my mind made up, Acronis it will be.

[Feline]

Seems you have already made up your mind and think you've made the right choice.

Used to use Ghost - but the problem was that you had to close Windows and run Ghost under DOS - think they have corrected that now - but I'm just no longer a fan of Symantec (bloatware which puts all sorts of crap into hard-to-get-at areas of your hard disk).

Acronis runs from Windows and does a very fine (and quick) job of imaging an entire disk. Would personally recommend doing Full Backups rather than incremental backups (incremental backups don't save you very much time and quickly become rather large).

Also - be aware that if you just need to recover a single file, Acronis allows you to mount the image as a disk drive and you can simply copy the file off to where you need it - very convenient indeed!

Very neat software! Latest version is Acronis True Image Home Version 11.0