What To Get?

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Hi - I was excited to find Acronis, I think it will help me set up a protection system for my work computers, but I do not know what to get.
I have 5 computers and want to make a back up hard drive for each so if there is a HD failure I can simply change over the defective HD.
Which Acronis should I get and is there one that continuously backs up?
If there is one that continuously backs up, can I change that HD over to the main HD if it fails?
Thanks in advance.
Paul

dim 23/05/2010 - 11:59
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Paul,

The first thing is that you'd need to purchase either 5 copies of TI or perhaps one of Acronis' special offers or if you are in need of a new firewall and AV software the ABS package that comes with three licences, so you'd either need to buy two of those or one plus two ordinary licences.

By your description it sounds as though you want to clone a drive. If that is the case then standard True Image or ABS is the way to go.

However, the choice really comes down to the following questions.

1. How many hard drives do each of these PC's have internally?

2. Are you proposing to purchase 5 drives (one for each PC) to hold the copy?

3. How new or old are the PC's as far as motherboard and chipset are concerned.

True Image Home is able to make a continuous back up with automatic settings to a partition or drive of your choice. Note though, this option will over time expand to how ever much free space that drive has. This option will not allow you to just plug a drive in and carry on if there is a failure, you'll actually have to restore the Non Stop Backup image.

Both TI Home and ABR (the workstation version) can be scheduled to make an image every minute or hour. With this type of schedule you can have more control over the size or your archives.

Before going much further, it would be helpful if you could describe type of files/disk you are thinking about imaging.

The business workstation version has even more control of the type of imaging you can do as well as having some built in imaging styles such as Grandfather/Father/Son and Tower of Hanoi backup plans.

Unless you need the extra flexibility or the possibility of being able to control the imaging tasks from one designated 'master' PC you probably won't need the business versions.

There are advantages and disadvantages to cloning.

Advantages
- you can test the drive out immediately to check the clone has worked correctly.
- in the event of a failure, you will be up and running again as soon as the drive is swapped.
- loss of data is less likely due to the disk data not being compressed into a proprietary format (risk is low, but a possibility).

Disadvantages:
- You can not schedule a clone task, if the information on the spare drive needs updating, you'll need to clone it manually.
- Depending on your system, you might need to perform reverse cloning (see Grover's notes on this).
- You will need one drive for each computer with at least the same capacity as the drive being cloned.

Imaging a system:
- Possible to image all five computers to one external drive (depends on combined total capacity of PC drives versus external drive size).
- Disk images can be compressed in size.
- Depending on the type of imaging process chosen, you can restore back to a specific time period.

Once decided on the version of TI, it would be a good idea to download the trial version and make a rescue CD, to check if the rescue environment has any problems with your PC's. The recovery environment is a version of Linux and the drivers sometimes have a problem with the very latest hardware. To avoid confusion in the recovery environment, make sure that all your drives have meaningful label names as Linux doesn't always assign 'c:\' to the partition or drive that Windows does. Drive names on the other hand never change.

dim 23/05/2010 - 13:08
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Thanks Colin - Great info and more than I expected,

Yes, I am going to clone each machine. The idea is to minimise the down time with the POS computers if there is a hard drive failure (had two in the last year) - just simply drop in the cloned unit and install the backup of the daily product and price updates specific to the POS program. These systems are all stand alone units simply networked.

I have had 5 units made, all with exactly the same components and have 5 backup hard drives exactly the same as the ones in the new computers. I even had a spare case made with everything except the hard drive. When the POS computers go down it is devastating to the business. It sounds like your standard program will do do the individual cloning.

It sounds like TI Home may be a solution to the files if it could do a backup of the 5 units files via network to a stand alone USB backup drive.

dim 23/05/2010 - 20:20