Acronis TI Home 2009, not as bad as I thought.
I use TI 2009 Home and it works but I'm not pleased with how complex it is.
I just tried The competition (Macrium Recover Free version) and it seemed to work when I backed up to, and restored from, a different internal sata drive.
When I backed up to, and restored from, an external firewire drive it did restore all right, but it also totally scrambled my drive letters. My A floppy was now G, my C system was now E, my sata #2 went from G to D, my cd/dvd drives went from D & E to limbo. Also the wrong drive was made the active partition, no booting allowed.
This was painful to fix, the Paragon boot fix cd couldn't fix it. I found a BART boot cd and was able to get into XP Disk Manager and did get it working again.
Good bye to Macrium, I don't suggest anyone try it on their computer.
Acronis is looking better all the time.
Fungus
So what is it that worked and what didn't. Are you damning ATI with faint praise or praising it with a faint damn?
Nah ... I think he just wants to get his post count started ... and I want to get mine up to where it was on the old forum. LOL.
So what is it that worked and what didn't. Are you damning ATI with faint praise or praising it with a faint damn?
Scott
I enjoy playing with good freeware, I have dozens of them that I regularly use, I tried Macrium.
TI does what I want without errors. My needs are simple, I want to do manual full partition or full disc images and record them on external firewire connected hard drives. Of course I also want to be able to restore entire images, or individual files, when booted from a CD. TI does all this well. I can use the Linux or the Bart CD with success.
My complaints are that TI is trying to do dozens of other things for me such as "Try & Decide", or even deciding for me where to store backups for me. I don't need or want all the extra accessories that just make things more complicated.
Macrium is simpler for sure, and if it didn't scramble drive letters, I would continue to use it. Macrium's wizards are more linear and idiot-proof, I need that. Simple is best.
I cannot imagine that Macrium always scrambles drive letters, and randomly decides which drive will be marked as "active". If so they would be out of business in a month. Just the same, I'll not run it again, ever.
Acronis TI: 1
Macrium: 0
Fungus
My ATI 2009 build 9796 is stable and been working now for a month or so. The only challenge was writing a complicated batch file to handle PRE and POST commands. But this has been done and works a treat.
It will take a lot to get me to move from the current version as it is now stable and working under Windows XP on my hardware.
I went through the whole process to satisfy what you want and I documented it completly with Tips what do, what to buy, what to avoid and Acronis tips I found. See post FREE to use: a plan ....... in this forum
I have used the copy disk to another disk. It took a long time. When done it looked just fine. I created the acronis disk management. It said make secure zone. I did that. I took the drive out that i wanted and put it in another machine with the same bios and everything. It would not boot up. Can any body give a way to make it boot. Own inital boot it comes up with the bois reconizes everything, and then it goes to windows apoligizes for not loading. Start normal last good config. It won't even go in safe mode. Reboot and it goes to flash screen and del septup or esc for boot menu. It doesn't give hdd to boot. Floppy or Cd-rom
I have used both True Image Version 10, 11 and TI 2009 and all worked very good with me which I use only for image backup and restore and nothing else. I have also used Macrium Reflect Full version which is also very good. The excellent feature of paid version of Macrium Reflect is that the WINPE boot cd from which you can repair and fix boot problems of XP and Windows 7 or Vista quite simply. I wish Acronis also bring WINPE version of their True Image with file explorer facility which will make it a really a great product