Posted: 5/29/2010 10:26:15 AM EDT
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I was thinking of getting a copy of Acronis to back up my home HD. I've doing manual file backups but I like the idea of just being able to restore an entire HD.
Supposedly it can restore an image to a different machine. Eg. My Sony gets smoked by a ligtning bolt, I could buy a new HP and restore the disk image to the new machine and actually have it run. Has anyone actually tried this? Does it really work? Also, they have a home version and a sligtly more expensive workstation version. Is there any practical benefit for a home user of the more expensive workstation version? Thanks! |
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I can't speak to restoring to a different machine, I've never needed to do that, but XP/Vista/7 will need to be re-registered with Mr.Softie to keep them from shutting you down in 30 days. It's an easy phone call to MS, read them a few numbers and they give you a specific passcode to reactivate the OS. I use it to restore to larger hard drives when I want to back up to more space on a newer and larger drive. Thats all I've got. |
| Yea, as stated above, newer versions of Windows (XP+) keep track of what kind of hardware is in your system, and it'l blue screen on boot up if the motherboard or ide controller chipsets have changed. So, you can easily restore to the same machine if it's hard drive died on you, but if the mother board goes, you're going to be doing a fresh install of the OS, and trying to manually extract and restore parts of your backups. |
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Yea, as stated above, newer versions of Windows (XP+) keep track of what kind of hardware is in your system, and it'l blue screen on boot up if the motherboard or ide controller chipsets have changed. So, you can easily restore to the same machine if it's hard drive died on you, but if the mother board goes, you're going to be doing a fresh install of the OS, and trying to manually extract and restore parts of your backups. which is no fun at all |
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I'm a server admin and I use Acronis on both servers and my home machines. You can indeed restore to a different hardware platform and I like that feature. I think it is an extra option on the home version (costs a little more). To be honest though, the current version of their home product is kind of squirrley and has some issues they are aware of. Mostly it's a lot slower than previous versions for some reason. It does work though and it is my preferred backup solution at work and home. |
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I use Clonezilla for all my OS backups to external media. I also use a combination of Carbonite and rsync to backup files. I have a nice home internet connection, so it's pretty snappy to send the delta daily. Acronis works pretty well though and I wouldn't hesitate to use it on anything younger than Windows Vista/Windows 7 (as stated, their native backup solution is pretty darn good). |
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What OS? If you are using Windows 7, I would recommend using the native backup. For older windows, Acronis works extremely well. I give it the fiver stamp of approval. The home version should be fine for you. ^^ this. We used Acronis to clone a couple of workstations at the office and they were different hardware... damned good backup software. |
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We tried to do a "Universal Restore" on our machines when we converted, with the 2009 version, I think. The "universal" isn't. Granted, we were going from a generic machine to Dells (Bad Choice!) but that portion of the system did not work as advertised.
The tech support was pretty good. Can't get it to do an automatic scheduled backup, yet, but for the price, you can't beat it. |