I recently purchased Acronis True Image Home 2011. Has anyone used it? Any suggestions for making best use? I would like to create an identical disk from my desktop disk. I use the desktop for trading and in case of a disk crash I would like to be able to use the backup on a bare metal machine. Do you think I need an add-on for that or disk cloning option will do it? Thanks
Hi, we use Acronis to back up multiple workstations on a network which is not trading related we do one full drive image of each pc and copy it onto an external hard drive, on that drive we keep the last 3 images for each pc. basically we have the last 3 months of data and config backed up for each workstations. its very user frendly and easy to work with we had to use an image to restore one fried drive once and it worked nicely cheers, Totantaz
I prefer mirrors and shadows and you can rotate one of the mirrors out if you want. You can even ship one offsite. For an IT dept I'm sure Acronis is good stuff. But I've heard horror stories where people use it at a home office and when there's a problem, it's always something with respect to installing the old Acronis version again, licensing, compatibility, etc. You buy this stuff and rely on it and when you need it to perform, you're up the river without a paddle. At least with mirrors and shadows (and rotating a disc) you have physical discs with your stuff on them. Quick swap if something goes wrong.
mgookin is right. Sounds like you want a RAID 1 setup (mirror). I have had disks go bad several times in the years I've been trading and its frustrating. I finally moved to true hardware raid this summer using a 3ware/LSI controller and Seagate enterprise disks. If a disk fails the controller notifies you to swap it out for a new one, then auto rebuilds the new disk. Zero downtime.
That's an elegant solution, but fairly expensive. It protects well against system failures, but not against mistakes. And I have been known to make those. I have used Acronis 2009 and 2010 (64-bit) versions and have been satisfied. I once needed to do a disc recovery using the 2009 version on WinXP.
rwk, did you use the disk cloning option or the disk backup? I am still confused about the different options. I also read there is an add-on that creates a backup which is hardware independent. I need to create a backup disk that will boot and will have the exact same information on it as the original PC disk. What option is the best to use? Thanks
The last time I replaced my boot drive, I used Migrate Easy. As a side note, cloning a boot drive is not something I do very often, and I think it strange that Acronis gives a 15-day trial on s/w that gets used once. It also looks to me like True Image has the same capabilities for cloning a disk as Migrate Easy, so I'm not sure where Migrate Easy fits into their product schedule. When I trashed my hard drive, I used a full backup created with True Image 2009 on a WinXP system to recover. It worked well, and I was impressed. I read some reviews that an early release of True Image 2010 (64-bit) was buggy. That's unfortunate, but not that uncommon for new s/w. Mine works well. I plan to stay with Acronis True Image and to also use that when/if I need to clone a hard drive. I looked at RAID for my new computer (last January) and decided that RAID is overkill for what I need and doesn't protect me from my screwups.
Acronis Obviously have a second hard disk in the machine, if you want to be ultra safe install a removable hard drive in the machine so you can store the back up else where. Open acronis> disk utilities> clone disk> follow instructions to copy entire disk. I do it once a week. If the original disk gets hosed for whatever reason reboot machine go into bios and set the cloned disk to be the boot disk, boot up. That now becomes primary ( C ) disk. If the original C disk was corrupted by malware , not a physical problem , so it's still a functioning disk, just copy the new C disk to the corrupted disk. Acronis will reformat and copy erasing any crap. You can ping pong them back and forth as much as you need to. Been doing it for years. XP pro os.
A second hard drive for backups is probably the best return on investment. The advantage of cloning your hard drive is that it is very quick to recover. In my case, I have a separate computer for trading. I did this initially for info security purposes, but I found it was worth it simply for the redundancy. I have identical setups on my development and trading machines and can trade either place. The only negative is the extra desk space of two computers. If that's a problem, you might try a KVM switch. So being able to recover quickly from a disc crash is not a high priority for me. Probably the most important thing I own is my trading software which I wrote. I burn critical files to a DVD monthly and store the copy in the trunk of my car. That's my offsite backup. I'm a stingy bastard!
Banjo, very helpful info, thanks. I purchased a Seagate Expansion 500 GB USG 2.0 portable drive. I only have about 50GB on my trading computer C: drive to backup (XP SP3). This Seagate comes with some programs installed, like a setup.exe and autorun.inf. Do you delete these prior to cloning or it does not matter?