Best OS image recovery software

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#938876 22-Nov-2013 11:28

Further on WinPE [edit] with Macrium Reflect.

The WinPE disk allows you to backup and restore but I normally only use them to restore as I can backup live partitions anyway.

It is Windows based so the correct drivers are needed but if you don't have them then the WinPE version can download them and it includes network address configuration to help with Internet access. It can also repair many Windows boot problems.

The paid version has a useful feature if you work with many systems. You can redeploy Reflect to the restored system and Reflect will use the drivers from the installed Windows version. This is useful, for example, if you work a lot with VMs. Reflect won't redeploy to a server system such as WSBS unless you have the network version of Reflect.

I should have said that the free Macrium Reflect is licensed for personal use only.

timmmay

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#938898 22-Nov-2013 11:38

Thanks Hammerer, useful information. I'll give it a try, though I don't really have disks to do recovery testing to so it'll probably be install and image now (and regularly), see how it works next time I have a problem. I wouldn't blow away my current OS and restore it again just because of time and risk.

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#938905 22-Nov-2013 11:45

eh? i used win 7 complete PC backup onto external HDD and have sucessfully restored every time? (4-5 times in total)

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#938923 22-Nov-2013 12:00

joker97: eh? i used win 7 complete PC backup onto external HDD and have sucessfully restored every time? (4-5 times in total)

I use the built in Windows backups too for additional redundancy even though I also use other backup and recovery software. The advantage of the other software is that you have more flexibility over how and where you restore. Quite often you will be restoring because a hardware problem has compromised your system configuration and you've had to replace hardware. As those situations get more complex third-party software becomes more useful because it is less dependent upon the system configuration unlike Windows backup and restore.

Also, I have more than one PC, as many of us do, and I can use the one application for all my different editions and versions of Windows.

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#938945 22-Nov-2013 12:22

joker97: eh? i used win 7 complete PC backup onto external HDD and have sucessfully restored every time? (4-5 times in total)

You mean the windows image backup? I backed up to my D drive, during restore it didn't want to seem to look for images anywhere other than the C drive.

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#938978 22-Nov-2013 13:02

The problem with the Win 7 backup is it's too slow. I've used Macrium Reflect a few times always worked pretty well.

Also many SSD's actually "come" with a white label version of acronis, by "come" I mean download from the manufacturers website for free.

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#939006 22-Nov-2013 13:25

My new Samsung SSD doesn't seem to supply software like that. They do have some software Samsung Magician which does some kind of data migration, perhaps other bits and pieces. It's not well explained so I probably won't bother installing it unless it's recommended I do.

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#939035 22-Nov-2013 14:23

timmmay:
joker97: eh? i used win 7 complete PC backup onto external HDD and have sucessfully restored every time? (4-5 times in total)

You mean the windows image backup? I backed up to my D drive, during restore it didn't want to seem to look for images anywhere other than the C drive.

yes. both vista and windows 7. i believe have used both external hdd and internal secondary drives with no issues.

i appreciate the windows restore environment is a very strange labyrinth with very strange behaviour so i can totally imagine how frustrated it made you.

DuncanMcC

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#939118 22-Nov-2013 15:40

Last time I checked - and it was a year or so ago! :) - Paragon's Drive Backup was considerably cheaper than Acronis Trueimage. Pretty much the same features.

timmmay

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#939119 22-Nov-2013 15:46

From memory Paragon and Macrium have basic free versions and reasonably priced standard versions. I'm going to try Macrium Reflect free to see how it is, then probably upgrade to standard to get incremental backups.

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#939142 22-Nov-2013 16:38

CloneZilla?

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#939221 22-Nov-2013 19:06

I'm not a big fan of things ending in zilla. Perhaps I just have a gorilla phobia.

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#939251 22-Nov-2013 19:51

i set up my computers to dual-boot using VHD boot. that way I can run a couple of OS's (e.g. win7 and win8) and to backup the OS drive its simply a matter of booting into the other OS and copying the VHD file.

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timmmay

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#939264 22-Nov-2013 20:03

VHD?

timmmay

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#939579 23-Nov-2013 18:01

I did a test run with Macrium, restoring an SSD image to a spinning disk. It did the job perfectly, made it bootable and worked properly. The recovery environment is Win PE, version 4 doesn't work at all, version 3.1 works fine. So I'm going to run with that, perhaps paying to get incremental backups.

I booted from a spinning disk to test it. Holy smoke those things are slow for OS! I boot in maybe 15 seconds with the SSD, and the computer's usable immediately. With a spinning disk it took at least a minute, and the computer wasn't usable for another few minutes. Mental.

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