Acronis vs Paragon backup software.

[24c]

Currently use Acronis True Image Home 2010, have used ATI since ATI 8. I make manual back ups of the COMPLETE disk and manual restores of same. In the years I've used ATI I had 1 back up image that didn't restore properly, since I keep 2 or 3 it wasn't an issue.

I tried Paragon, no problems, prefer ATI.

 

[craney5]

neither Macrium reflect for me, its free and does a great job at restoring an image with ease

 

[HammerHead]

Acronis 2011

Good question. I'd rather have the backup happen than not happen. Since I am not home very ofter, and very busy when I am home, I tend to run maintenance actions at night in an unattended mode.

Which means its best if the process doesn't prompt me for anything except at the very beginning when I present, so that when I get back hours ( days ) later, I find the process is done, and check the report to see if there were any problems that I should know about. If I came home only to find "hey, non-fatal error here. Want me to continue? Click OK to continue" on the screen, I would uninstall the application and try a different one..


PS. My trial of Paragon did not go well. It tried to backup my C: drive and failed. Then I let my Netbook run out of power to test the hibernate function, and it would not boot back up. It displayed "Press F6 to start Paragon Recovery Tools" , whether I pressed it or not, the screen would go blank with just a flashing curson. I booted Windows recovery disk and ran bootrec.exe /fixmbr to get rid of Paragon, and my system started up normally.

As you may have guessed , I uninstalled Paragon first thing after I booted up.

I'm going with Acronis 2010

Before you go with ATI 2010 take a look at ATI 2011. It's the latest ver.

 

[SIW2]

It's whatever works for you.

None of them are perfect. There will always be some systems that one or more backup apps. won't be happy with.

They all have different priorities also.

Paragon for example is perhaps not the quickest, it's certainly not the prettiest.

As far as I know , Paragon is the only backup image app. that will test the drive and warn of any problems. The others just rush ahead regardless.

Seems to me that is a big advantage - you don't want to find out too late there is something wrong with the drive. Corrupt images are rare , but almost always the result of problems with the drive.

It is also the lowest in resource usage - a design decision on the basis backups should go on behind the scenes as unobtrusively as possible.

 

[zapp22]

ugghh.... wish I had not seen that last post!

If I can piggyback on this: what I don't see in the above discussions is what the endgame is?
The only reason I Have used all these packages and a few others is to move drives - make image, change to faster/better/cooler/lower-power/bigger drives and have the system come alive and ACTIVATE and VALIDATE, and AUTHENTICATE, UPDATE, etc without a hiccup. On a handful of system images/restores I did, Paragon was the clear winner - HOWEVER, Paragon's Bootable CD-based program is badly flawed. LIke many Linux's I've toyed with, it will work on a very narrow range of hardware, and will produce grievous errors on a slew of others.... including one sorry box I'm working with now. Just cannot sort out the box's BIOS, video, etc.
So I am back on the hunt... show me a program that can b/u and restore a full bit-for-bit image that will boot first time and activate/validate with nary an issue.....

 

[Wishmaster]

I too am an Acronis user and have been very happy with it, and haven't had any issues so far.

If your goal is to make an exact bit per bit image, you can tell it to do a sector by sector image, as well as back up free space if want.

This isn't really needed though.

I just image the entire disc without these options, and have never had a issue with activation status, or anthing else with a restore. And Ive done quite a few of them.

Acronis can also start the back up from within Windows, and do restore at reboot.
Or from the CD if you can not get into Windows or prefer that way.

 

[whs]

Here is the backup time I get with Macrium for a 20GB of data in a 60GB OS only partition. But as you can see, I run it on high priority. And the image is appr. 10GBs.

 

[SIW2]

The boot discs that come with all the free versions are all Linux based - that includes Acronis and Macrium.

If you are happy with the Paragon app. you can easily make your own pe boot disc.

It is very easy.

You only need the 32 bit 7 install media ( or the 32 bit recovery disc that you run off from within 7 ) and the Paragon app. you already have installed.

 

[zapp22]

Due to the Paragon bootable media being incompatible with my hdwe .. I'll give Macrium a shot today.
The last time I tried Macrium the image would not boot properly, and when I finally got it fixed, it would not activate.
Maybe it will be different this time.

Does anyone know if there is a way to burn to one CD BOTH the Linux and BartPE versions of their boot package? that way when the linux version fails I can use the Bart

 

[whs]

The BartPE from Macrium does not seem to be compatible with Win7. I guess you have to make your own as SIW2 suggested. But I never had any problems with the Linux version - and I have made a LOT of recoveries (for real, for test and for demo).

 

[Mark Phelps]

Don't know about the BartPE version of Macrium. Tried to create it and it failed. So, never got a chance to use it.

But I have used the WinPE version and it works flawlessly. Even has an option to install to the drive so you don't need an actual CD to do the restore.

MR also has an option known as Redeploy which they claims works in much the same manner as the Paragon Adaptive Restore option. IT costs $20 and I was going to use it when I migrated from one PC to another, but when I stuck the old drive in the new machine and rebooted, Win7 detected all the new hardware and sorted out the drivers itself! The only driver I had to install myself was the AMD video driver. So, I can't tell you if Redeploy works as I never actually had to use it.

 

[WartHog]

Sorry for the no value added post in this thread, but I wanted to subscribe so I can read it later and I'm on Tapatalk and don't know how to subscribe in this program. Now I am.

 

[zapp22]

Wo.... Glad I read some more fine print: Someone tell me if I have this right. There are several threads on this forum touting Macrium Free and paygo. I read them, and only in one of them http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/83507-macrium-image-restore-2.html does it seem that the right questions are asked and answered.

If they are correct, and if my understanding of the English is correct, Macrium is NOT the same animal as Paragon. Paragon can take a saved image of WINDOWS SEVEN, "restore" it to a brand new Hard Drive of whatever size, and your system will boot, run, ACTIVATE, VALIDATE, etc ..... That is NOT the case with Macrium Free. Correcto ???? Glad I stopped my experiment when some things in Macrium clued me to dig a little more

 

[whs]

Wo.... Glad I read some more fine print: Someone tell me if I have this right. There are several threads on this forum touting Macrium Free and paygo. I read them, and only in one of them http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/83507-macrium-image-restore-2.html does it seem that the right questions are asked and answered.

If they are correct, and if my understanding of the English is correct, Macrium is NOT the same animal as Paragon. Paragon can take a saved image of WINDOWS SEVEN, "restore" it to a brand new Hard Drive of whatever size, and your system will boot, run, ACTIVATE, VALIDATE, etc ..... That is NOT the case with Macrium Free. Correcto ???? Glad I stopped my experiment when some things in Macrium clued me to dig a little more

You are correct. Macrium cannot resize the image and dump it into a smaller partition. The target partition must be of equal or larger size than the originating partition. Paragon can resize - Macrium pro Btw. too. But who wants to spend money.

The safest way to move a system from one disk to another is this Pargon program: (works for HDDs too) Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - Overview

 

[zapp22]

But irrespective of mismatched HDD sizes, Macrium Free apparently doesn't get it right... doesn't actually write a bootable and activatable system partition [Windows 7] so you have an exact copy of your prior setup. Good for backing up miscellaneous files and such, but not bootable/activated etc.
I'm like the Federal Government... i don't downsize, I only grow and consume the host . Bigger drive.

I'll check out that paragon link, but I betcha their bootable media won't run on my sys. At least Macrium got THAT right!

Wo.... Glad I read some more fine print: Someone tell me if I have this right. There are several threads on this forum touting Macrium Free and paygo. I read them, and only in one of them http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/83507-macrium-image-restore-2.html does it seem that the right questions are asked and answered.

If they are correct, and if my understanding of the English is correct, Macrium is NOT the same animal as Paragon. Paragon can take a saved image of WINDOWS SEVEN, "restore" it to a brand new Hard Drive of whatever size, and your system will boot, run, ACTIVATE, VALIDATE, etc ..... That is NOT the case with Macrium Free. Correcto ???? Glad I stopped my experiment when some things in Macrium clued me to dig a little more

You are correct. Macrium cannot resize the image and dump it into a smaller partition. The target partition must be of equal or larger size than the originating partition. Paragon can resize - Macrium pro Btw. too. But who wants to spend money.

The safest way to move a system from one disk to another is this Pargon program: (works for HDDs too) Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - Overview

 

[whs]

I have used the Paragon program I linked. It worked flawlessly, including the little active boot partition. For SSDs, it also does the alignment.

With free Macrium, you have to do all that by hand. Have done that too, but it is more work because you are now dealing with 2 partitions.

The Win7 imaging is said to deal with the boot partition automatically. But the whole thing is such a dog that I would not bet my system on it. For starters it wrecked 2 of my best DVDs.

Btw: many people "downsize" these days - at least for the OS because they install SSDs. So that is a pretty common problem.

 

[SIW2]

Save yourself a lot of time and make a pe3 disc with Paragon and macrium on it.

 

[mjf]

With Windows imaging you can rename the image folder and move it into separate folders (just don't cross partition boundaries). You can do a restore using the system repair boot disk with renamed and moved WindowsImageBackup folders see:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/675-system-image-recovery.html

With Macrium as well as the linux rescue CD/USB, which has always worked for me, you can use the Hiren's Boot CD (v13). Hiren's gives a similar capability to the Bartpe disk since it uses a mini XP option. There is no need to make your own pe disk.

Using Macrium free or paid Macrium "RoboRestore" enables you to restore to a disk that is smaller than the original. RoboRestore uses Windows RoboCopy.
Macrium Reflect - Blogs and News

 

[WartHog]

Good info and lots of good experiences shared. I really appreciate everyone's input. I'm learning alot.

I do have a noob question though. When you all talk about BartPE and PE discs exactly what do you mean?

 

[SIW2]

A recovery disc contains a mini operating system. Typically you would boot it up from a dvd or flash drive, and it loads into memory.

From there you can run various applications - to install, or repair the operating system on your Hard Drive, or perform various operations that are best done outside of your windows installation - or in this case, to restore an image you made earlier.

There are many types of mini operating systems you could use for this- linux, dos, one based on XP ( pe or pe1 ), Vista based (pe2) or Windows 7 based (pe3).

PE means pre-installation environment ( a mini o/s from where you run the installation).

RE means recovery environment ( from where you run repair/recovery apps.)

The environment is the mini o/s and is essentially the same for PE or RE.

Simply PE is often used to describe any of the above windows environments.

Building a simple pe disc is not very hard if you start with either the boot.wim (included on the 7 install dvd ), or winre.wim ( on your HD in the hideen folder ), or the boot.wim from the 7 recovery disc you run off from within windows.

If you are prepared to put a lot of effort in - you can get something like this: