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Which product to do daily image of system disk ?

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In a new Windows 7 Pro 64 bit PC we have two internal drives...
C: System & Applications
D: Data Disk

We want to be able to capture an image C: daily and/or just before new software installations...
... such that we can just put the prior image back on when we want to "go back."

We may also want burn the image to an optical device or store it on another drive.

1 - Which Acronis product should we consider?

2 - And, if we install this on a PC on our small Peer-to-Peer network can we image any drive on the network?

3 - Does the "Image" software also allow for "backing up" selected directories/folders?

4 - In the past I was under the impression that an Image App actually captured all the data on the drive... but I seem to have read that is no longer the case and that certain system or hidden files may not be captured in the "image" (and/or the backup). Is this true?

It would seem there should be some way to operate the drive to be imaged at a low level so that all data was simply captured... sector by sector or for every concentric circle (track?) or whatever.

Thanks for any help.

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Mel,

As you need to be able to log onto other PC's on the network, you need to look at ABR10, if you just want to store images on a netowkr drive then True Image Home will do everything you need.

If you only want to make images prior to new software installation, you will need to run the imaging software manually.

That covers 1,2 and 3 above.

A complete disk image will image all files on the drive, there can be problems if the PC is an OEM machine and has a non standard MBR, under certain circumstances restoring the image might rewrite the MBR to a standard one.

You are able to make sector by sector images, but they will be the exact same size as your complete disk, whereas used sectors imaging can use compression and by it's very nature will be substantially smaller..

2 - you can't make images of partitions over the network, the product must be installed on the computer being imaged. You can perform file backup of shared folders on the other computer, but not partitions/disks.

I thought Advanced Workstation version of ABR10 would be able to do this. You'd need to have t.he agent on each machine though

Thanks for the help!

Colin... you said...

"A complete disk image will image all files on the drive, there can be problems if the PC is an OEM machine and has a non standard MBR, under certain circumstances restoring the image might rewrite the MBR to a standard one."

My Question: How can we tell if we have a "non standard MBR" ?

"You are able to make sector by sector images, but they will be the exact same size as your complete disk, whereas used sectors imaging can use compression and by it's very nature will be substantially smaller.."

My questions: So there are two modes...
- "sector by sector images" that result in no compression...
- and "sector imaging" which does result in compression...
... right?
... Do you select one of these two modes before you image the disk?
... Do both have the issue with the "non standard MBR" ??

Thanks for the help.

If your machine is a Dell or a Dell media centre then it has probably has a non standard MBR - this relates to home machines, the Dell workstations etc, I don't know, I suspect not.

Some Sony and IBM laptops have as well. One of the clues is if the machine has built in utilities that can be started by pressing an F button at boot time - for exmaple F11.

The default imaging is used sector, you have to specifically select sector by sector for a task before imaging.

I don't know whether the sector by sector method has the same 'gotcha'. What happens is that if Acronis software can't find or understand the MBR on a restore, it will insert a generic MBR, which is the same as that made when you partition a disk yourself using Windows Disk Manager or other 3rd party disk management software.

Thanks for the help all but this is just to complicated.

We will just install the Windows OS and Apps on one disk and put the data on another internal drive... or directly on the network drive.

Keep the OS & App's installation CD's handy so we can just rebuild the OS/Apps disk if needed...

And back up the internal data drive(s) to the network drive with any number of simple backup apps.

Then set the network drive up to be automatically backed up to one of the online services.

We may end up coming back and trying to consider Acronis again but for now I think we will just continue to use the simple solution.

Thanks again for the kind assistance.

Why not download the trial version and see if it is as complicated as you think it is?

Well, I would hate to image the system drive and then find out later that the MBR couldn't be recovered.

But maybe I'll give it a try on a machine we don't rely on.

Thanks again for the help.