Data Restore Software
Ghost – Scary Stuff
Symantec clearly warns you to test the recovery CD-ROM and even if they didn’t it’d be one of the first things you’d want to do anyway. If you can’t boot the recovery disk it doesn’t matter if you have a backup if you can’t get to it.
So the Ghost recovery disk goes in the CD-ROM drive; let’s boot it. It’s not unlike installing Windows, you’re prompted to install any special drivers which we did for the Perc controller. Things chugged along for a bit and then the blue screen of death appeared (actually the first time I’ve seen the BSoD in XP). I tried it again and it didn’t install the Perc drivers. Another BSoD, just different text.
We could make backups with no problem in Windows, you just couldn’t boot the restore disk and you can’t restore from Windows. Ouch.
I created a long, detailed report on the Symantec web site with full text of error messages, hardware details, OS details, the whole nine yards. I received a confirmation that I’d get a reply in 24 hours.
Five days later. No reply. I query them. They want me to use their live support chat feature complete with a link that returns a page not found. No way could I detail all the content from the BSoD even if I could get to the page. I replied by email.
They acquiesced to helping me by email. They pretty much suggested doing what I’ve been trying (loading the drivers) and then they slip one in on me; it only works with RAID-0 and RAID-5. There’s no mention of that in the Ghost 9.0 requirements page. My reply was that gee, “how was I supposed to know that” and “I’m not going to change my RAID configuration to use this, how about a refund” didn’t get anywhere; I’d have to talk to another department about that
of that in the Ghost 9.0 requirements page. My reply was that gee, “how was I supposed to know that” and “I’m not going to change my RAID configuration to use this, how about a refund” didn’t get anywhere; I’d have to talk to another department about that.
Can’t use it (Ghost) in the Windows 2003 box (Windows 2003 isn’t supported) so punt and use it in the Sony Digital Studio XP Media Center box, which I’ve left stock out of the box with no “funny” software or hardware. I slip in the CD, click on the install button and ten minutes later the CD is still spinning and locked up so bad that ctrl-alt-del won’t even bring up the task manager.
While Ghost might work well in your environment it failed my first requirement; that it actually work.
True Image – Slick & Functional
The True Image recovery CD-ROM can be created from the program itself or at the install time. I chose the latter and it didn’t even ask me about special drivers. I presume that it pulled them in from my configuration. Very slick. Booted it and no problem. Went to restore the image and wow, it worked.
There is one limit that I found with True Image, it does not support “dynamic disks”. If you have drives set up as dynamic disks, True Image will not create an image of them. Otherwise it handled everything that I could throw at them and never even burped.
Restoring a single or a couple of files from the True Image backup was a bit more time consuming than
Ghost. You had to “restore” the image backup to a temporary location and then select and copy the files from that temporary location. With Ghost you simply displayed the image, expanded it in an Explorer type interface and picked and copied the files you needed. A very small matter to be sure, but True Image worked so flawlessly that I was scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a drawback.
I can’t speak to the quality of Acronis support as I didn’t need to ask them since everything worked as advertised. I suspect you’d not need to contact them but if it’s anywhere near as good as their product, it’ll be top notch.
Image for Windows – Small, Fast and Effective
Image for Windows is a lean backup and restore program. It’s small and fast and has a somewhat “less slick” look to the interface than the others. Not that the process doesn’t offer options or functionality, they’re simply devoid of the graphics found in the other two programs.
Of course this cuts down on the size of the program to the point that the restore program (the Image for DOS version which comes with the package) can fit on a floppy diskette (which suits me as I still find comfort in diskettes, it’s an old guy thing). Oh, you can create a boot diskette on the CD-ROM for the Windows version if that’s your preference.
The option for boot disk is only necessary if you keep a
drive image on another drive; if you create your drive image on your CD-ROM, you need only boot that CD-ROM to restore it.
Restoring the drive (the C: boot drive) via the boot floppy and then the CD was fast and easy. I only had to point to the image file, hit enter and it was automatic from there on out.
The restored image was perfect, nary a glitch. A very well crafted program. I exchanged a few emails with questions about how Image worked with the author of Image for Windows. He was prompt and as the actual author of the software as opposed to a script reader knew what he was talking about. How refreshing.