Questions for anyone who's used Acronis True Image

[Ken90630]

Hi, All,

I'm planning on backing up a friend's entire hard disk -- I'm gonna image it, in other words -- with Acronis TI Home 2009. Obviously, I can choose to back it up to DVDs, an external HD or a USB flash drive.

She only has about 10GB used up on her HD (stop laughing :laugh: ), so a USB flash drive or some DVD discs would prolly be more economical than buying an external HD for ~ $100 (that's more than she wants to spend).

If you've used a flash drive for the backup, and then used the backup to restore the OS later, how fast did that go? Did you get USB 2.0 transfer speed during the restoration?

If you used DVDs as the backup media, how much compression did you have to use and how long does it take to perform a restoration from compressed discs? I know it varies depending on how much data is backed up, but I just wanna get some idea.

Thanks in advance.

 

[BlueWeasel]

I've not used flash drives with TI, but have used portable USB2.0 HDs. While I don't know the exact transfer numbers, it's definitely close to USB2.0 speeds. Certainly not USB1.1 speeds.

Depending on the files on her HD, you might be able to get the entire backup on a single DVD5, as using moderate compression in TI results in a 40-50% reduction in the backup.

 

[Ken90630]

Thanks for the feedback. Re the transfer speed performance you got with your USB external HD, are you referring to the speed it took to burn the backup or the speed you got doing a restoration procedure with the backup you'd made?

 

[Raincity]

True image 9 will compress the data and 10 gigs will fit on a single 4.7 gig dvd.

 

[dunkster]

My OS partition is lean at about 7GB actual used partition space.

The following apps have been used to image/restore the partition to/from 4.7GB DVD:
- Terabyte IFW/IFD.
- Acronis TI10.
- Paragon HD Manager 2009 Suite.

Standard compression in all instances.

Reliability 100%, speeds approximately equal (differences in seconds, not minutes).

Hope this helps!

 

[mooseracing]

Takes me 10 mins with Acronis across a Gb backbone to restore about ~20GB image.

Just normal compress, I also use eSata and it works great.

 

[bruceb]

I didn't think you can fit an OS and some apps in less than 10GB

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: bruceb
I didn't think you can fit an OS and some apps in less than 10GB

Probably not with Vista, but certainly with XP. Back when I used it, I had XP and all of my apps with right at 10GB. I did move the swap file to a different drive, so that helps.

 

[dunkster]

I didn't think you can fit an OS and some apps in less than 10GB

My OS partition is intentionally lean (XPSP3 + AV + Firewall/HIPS + Browsers) at 6.9GB used space.

All other apps (Word, Excel, Defragger, Partition Manager, utilities, etc.) I consider non-critical, installed in a small adjacent partition - using only about 840MB actual used space.

All could be combined in a 10GB partition, though I wouldn't feel comfortable with only 2GB free space.

Hope this helps!

 

[Ken90630]

Originally posted by: mooseracing
Takes me 10 mins with Acronis across a Gb backbone to restore about ~20GB image.

Just normal compress, I also use eSata and it works great.

Thanks, but what's a "Gb backbone"?

 

[mc866]

Gigabit backbone, or 1000BASE-T which has a transfer rate of up to a gigabit per second.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel

Originally posted by: bruceb
I didn't think you can fit an OS and some apps in less than 10GB

Probably not with Vista, but certainly with XP. Back when I used it, I had XP and all of my apps with right at 10GB. I did move the swap file to a different drive, so that helps.

Yeah my Vista used space with the OS and a few Applications is a little over 20 GB. Still not to bad.

 

[Ken90630]

Originally posted by: mc866
Gigabit backbone, or 1000BASE-T which has a transfer rate of up to a gigabit per second.

Oh, okay. I know you're not mooseracing, but what sort of hardware is involved in setting that type of transfer scheme up? Are we talking an ethernet cable, or ??? And from what device to the destination hard drive? Would the recovery source media be something like a server or ???

Sorry -- I'm not as sophisticated with this stuff yet as you guys (obviously).

 

[mooseracing]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel

Originally posted by: bruceb
I didn't think you can fit an OS and some apps in less than 10GB

Probably not with Vista, but certainly with XP. Back when I used it, I had XP and all of my apps with right at 10GB. I did move the swap file to a different drive, so that helps.

Vista Biz only burns about 3-4GB's, another 2 at most for Office, and then a few small common apps, and we can hover around 10GB for our images.

Most of my images are for hardware/software engineers, they each use alot of different software, so I have very basic images alot of times.

Originally posted by: Ken90630

Originally posted by: mc866
Gigabit backbone, or 1000BASE-T which has a transfer rate of up to a gigabit per second.

Oh, okay. I know you're not mooseracing, but what sort of hardware is involved in setting that type of transfer scheme up? Are we talking an ethernet cable, or ??? And from what device to the destination hard drive? Would the recovery source media be something like a server or ???

Sorry -- I'm not as sophisticated with this stuff yet as you guys (obviously).

Basically in my scenario we have one server that host all the images on a hidden network share on it's hard drive.

I pop in the Acronis CD (in the soon to be imaged PC), setup my network settings, then browse to the Server for my image file. Acronis downloads and expands it to the PC.

At home this could be as simple as connecting to you network and getting the file off your PC, or storing it on your PC.

It's very simple and easy to use, you can also do local backups/restores (ie off a usb/esata/firewire device.)

 

[mc866]

Originally posted by: Ken90630

Originally posted by: mc866
Gigabit backbone, or 1000BASE-T which has a transfer rate of up to a gigabit per second.

Oh, okay. I know you're not mooseracing, but what sort of hardware is involved in setting that type of transfer scheme up? Are we talking an ethernet cable, or ??? And from what device to the destination hard drive? Would the recovery source media be something like a server or ???

Sorry -- I'm not as sophisticated with this stuff yet as you guys (obviously).

In order to utilize gigE you are going to need equipment that supports it, though most home users really don't have an environment that makes the investment worth wile because the equipment can get pretty spendy. So you'll need a gigabit NIC card at each of your endpoints or pc's, you'll need cat6 cable connecting these units and most likely a gigabit switch in the middle. To utilize gigE's full potential make sure all these gig devices support jumbo frames. Hope that makes some sense.

So Router with GigE ports --> Cat6 --> GigE switch --> Cat6 --> All PC's or endpoints

 

[mooseracing]

Originally posted by: mc866


So Router with GigE ports --> Cat6 --> GigE switch --> Cat6 --> All PC's or endpoints

Cat5e hits Gb with no problems. cat6 is future proofing for 10Gb