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True Image 2009 vs. R-Drive 4.6

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Lately I've been seeking an imaging product that works better than TI. The things I'm looking at are the basics: Installing, creating a boot CD, making Manual full backup images, verifying images, and restoring these full images. I'm not interested in schedules, incremental backups, or any other extras.

Last night I installed the free trial R-Drive 4.6 and played with it.
I installed it on my spare pc which is a W2000 sp4 machine having IDE hard drives.

R-Drive installed fast and started great. The operating screen panel is simple and easy to use. There are no difficult decisions to make when starting a backup. I started a full image of my C system partition to the second partition on the same hard drive. This was done from Windows.

At that time I saw problems. The 8.3 GB took 28 minutes to complete, that is 0.296 GB per minute. TI and Easeus Todo run about 4x that.

I did a verify and it errored with "file corrupt 3400". I started the verify again and got the same error. This same data and destination have been used to test other imaging programs without errors.

Now I ran chkdsk /r on both partitions and no errors were found.

Next I booted the R-Drive boot CD and did the same backup and verify. Same verify error, however the backup went faster, 0.48 GB min.

Next I booted the R-Drive cd and backed up to a sata hard drive in an external usb adapter. Backup finished and verify gave me more of the same verify errors. I doubt that both of my destination hard drives have errors.

I never was able to get a backup of partition C (8.3 GB) without verify errors.

My personal conclusion:
TI-2009 is the winner.
R-Drive 4.6 isn't.

TI does everything right that RD does right. TI also does things right that I couldn't get RD to correctly.

I'm sure that RD does work for some people but I have no confidence in images with reported verify errors.

Major issues with RD:
Slow backup
Verify errors
Weak support forum

R-Drive has a user forum but the offered help is slim.
http://forum.r-tt.com/viewforum.php?f=14

Fungus

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Fungus:

I've been following your threads about alternate imaging programs with interest. Lately I've been evaluating Windows 7 imaging and Windows Home Server.

Windows 7 imaging gets the job done but lacks flexibility (see reply #11 in this thread).

Windows Home Server is really interesting and it has become my backup method of choice at home. It automatically backs up all of the PCs on your home network (up to 10 PCs) every night while you are asleep, and it uses a de-duplication algorithm for minimum storage space (clusters that are the same on different PCs are not duplicated in the backup database). I have 3 months of daily backups of 4 PCs that occupy only 100 GB of storage space. You can purchase hardware with the OS preinstalled or just the OS itself.

Have you evaluated Clonezilla? It's a little geeky (OK; it's very geeky) but it gets the job done.

At work I went full-circle and finally returned to using TI (Version 10). I love TI's flexibility and it has never failed to do its primary task of backing up and restoring partitions. This it does very well.

Mark:

Thanks for the info on W7 and W home server. The home server sounds like a good idea if one is using a home server. I'm not in the mood to go that far at this time.

I do think that it is only a matter of time until Microsoft does offer a decent image type of backup that will become the default for most users.

For now I'll continue playing with software, mostly "good" freeware. I have many that work better than paid for products. So far TI (even though it has issues) is best.

My wish would be for a TI that was "minimal" with as many optional features as people wanted to install, but only if they want them.

By the way, I have a TI version 10 in a box here, maybe I'll get it back out and have another look at it.

Peace,

Fungus