I didn’t want to hijack the other thread that 1magineer recommended this product.
1magineer, or anyone else using it … can you talk about your experience please? Have you ever had to depend on it/recover a disk? How hard/intrusive is it? Does it take a long time to image?
Right now, I am using a haphazard combination of a backup program, and manually dragging files, to a separate hard drive connected by USB. For the backup program, I always have this fear that though it looks so pretty, it won’t step up to the plate when the chips are down and I need it to recover data.
And as far as the manual drag … I’m pretty sure I’m only dragging the rendered audio and the .cpr/.bak/.csh/etc. files (since they are labelled by date), but missing a lot of the actual recorded audio files (since they are not).
So … I know you are happy with it 1magineer, and I am happy for you about that … please do tell more!
I have not done a full recovery of a drive yet (haven’t had the need), but I can vouch for the reliability of the product for imaging large files and folder and reconstructing them.
And the best part, is it is NOT expensive to buy and try!
I can’t see why you would bother with any thing other than windows own disk image , that’s good enough and works .
I used to use Acronis true image until I had a faulty drive and went to reinstall the image on a new drive and the effing bastarding wanky file was corrupt !!!
windows disk image is good enough
oppss just seen your on xp thou but i’ll leave my opinion here
BTW, one reason I chose O&O is MACHINE (HARDWARE) INDEPENDENCE. In other words, if I change a motherboard, or CPU, or a disk drive, O&O doesn’t care. I assume Acronis has this feature, but if not, that’s a feature I’d insist on.
yep it’s simple to use …source disk > destination disk > partition size >click > sit back and wait , couldn’t be simpler BUT for some reason I had one “clone” and 2 disk back ups that were completely corrupt so everything had to be reinstalled again .
Looking back at it now I should of sent Acronis a copy of the file as their online " chat " support is very good . Good software ,good company it’s just my bad experience , I still use it but it’s not the only safe guard I rely on
I can’t remember the horrors I had with Acronis about four years ago (I do remember that there were many people who had the same problem), so I tried Paragon Hard Disk Manager and I haven’t looked back. Even I can understand how it works and it’s not expensive. I have succesfully restored my office computer with it without a hitch. The problem with backups/mirrors is that there’s no way of telling if they’re going to do their stuff when needed.
Out of all the recommendations from all the highly respected posters on this site, this is one of the few I remember reading about that stated the program was actually tested to restore a full bad drive/computer - good to hear it worked out well!
I use Paragon Free to do my back ups, probably the same engine, I imagine. Pretty slow, and not an “image” program.
Maybe I should do the redundancy thing and back up two ways, onto two different drives: an image-based backup like O&O, and a file based backup like Paragon.
Would that sound like overkill, or appropriate caution?
I was first introduced to imaging software 20 years ago, when we used it to set up 30 classroom computers at a time for a particular class, say, Lotus Notes, and then the next day, for A+ training, etc. I was impressed with it then, and learned to trust it. We had a whole business relying on it. So though I haven’t had the need for it yet, it’s performance in imaging and restoring folders leaves me no reason to doubt. Don’t think O&O or Acronis would be around long if the product didn’t function as advertised.
