Msg: Re: imaging software

[First off, let me mention to all that for some years now I have used dedicated webmail gateways (proprietary to the provider) for my email. Fairly recently, they drastically changed their whole interface -- very much for the worse -- and with the messages posted to some lists I got reports of objectionable HTML-type gobbledygook in the quoted material. I've taken to reformatting said material to get around that, but it is more time-consuming and a pain in the rear. If you notice such funky stuff here, and it bothers you, I can take the aforementioned counter-measures,, including reducing quoted portions to a bare minimum.]

Michael, I have no vested interest in championing Acronis. They are just one of the major players still standing. (Is GHOST still on the market ?) I am aware of some more esoteric competing programs, such as Dantz Retrospect. On the one hand, I have never experienced the problems you cite with Acronis . . . but then, I have *never* installed it, anywhere. I run a self-booting CD of Acronis Media Pack 2012, which operates outside of Windows, and must carry its own mini-OS, most likely Linux-based. This has all or most of the Acronis programs on it. The only one of these that would need to be installed is their boot mediator, Acronis OS Selector. (My one, limited experience with that cannot be regarded as a success.) Therefore, so far as I know, no registry keys ever come into play.

On the other hand, I don't recall ever having to rely upon the restore half of Acronis TI usage, for a *critical* salvage operation. (I have used it for cloning to other hard drives, such as replacing one that was starting to exhibit alarming SMART errors, to a new and somewhat larger HDD.) So, I can't certify it as anything approaching "bullet-proof." If it is not, I would certainly like to change over to relying on some other program that pretty much _is_, for this vital backup category. We are not really talking about backing up your important data here: any capable file manager program can do that, under manual control. I happen to use ZTreeWin for this. What we are dealing with here is being able to put back your boot partition in one clean shot, and have it work again -- at least as per its state at the time the image was made -- rather than having to spend a couple weeks re-installing Windows from scratch, applying all of the MS security fixes, installing all of your apps, your personal desktop, user preferences etc., which to my mind amounts to cruel and unusual punishment ! (And Yes, it really has taken me about that long.)

This may have another test shortly, as something has severely impaired the 64-bit Win-7 I had on one box, making it all but unusable. Almost nothing opens now, I can't invoke Win Restore Points, can't run an AV scan, and so forth. Curiously enough, I think the damage was done by a slew of MS patches, all applied at once. If booting up in Safe Mode and removing them does not do the trick, I may have to resort to an Acronis image from last April. I *should have* made one more recent for that computer, but never did. Scrubbing off the existing boot partition and putting that April one on will be a risk. But it will be much better than nothing. This would be more of a test for Acronis TI than restoring to untouched iron, I think. More that could go wrong, anyway. I may even get to that today.

Please excuse the lengthy OT post, but some may find it beneficial.

Jordan

From: Michael Norman
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 9:56 AM
Subject: RE: imaging software

Beware Acronis. If you read their forum, and other security forums, such as
Wilders, you will see what I discovered the hard way. Acronis True Image
Home makes fundamental changes to your Opsys and is devilishly difficult to
uninstall, leaving behind a lot of registry entries that, for me, caused
havoc with USB flash drives not being recognized. I had ATIH10 and finally
got enough of it uninstalled (the regular uninstall is worthless) to correct
the problem, but it took a lot of troubleshooting. And I still have Acronis
junk in my registry. Whenever I use their co-called cleanup utility (which
also requires you to edit, on your own, additional registry keys the cleanup
program, for some reason, misses), I get a BSOD and have to invoke a restore
point. I've disabled all Acronis services and the junk that's left in the
registry is not throwing off any admin event warnings or errors, so I'm
going to leave the registry alone. I even had to toss two USB drives that
would not work on the Win7 machine that once had Acronis on it. They work
fine on any other machine, but on the PC that had Acronis they kept throwing
of Event ID 11 errors that named an Acronis process/driver. I'll be
troubleshooting this, I reckon, for some time.

I did not replace Acronis with another imaging program. Instead I installed
a 2TB NAS on the system and, using Second Copy, backup all important data
and the like to that every day, then, to be doubly safe (I'm in the middle
of a complex project and have a lot of data), I subscribed to one of the
online backup services, SOS, for the length of time of the project.

Michael Norman

Jordan,

There are various imaging software programs on the market, Acronis being one
of them. I know of none designed for home users (though there may of course
be such); the main market is for industrial strength networks which have to
restore training computers, for example, to original state after the
training is completed. Try google.

Cheers,
Flash