What is the best Image/data backup software

[berrios-zipline]

Utilities/Software

Powerquest Drive Image V7.03 -- Latest before Synmantic Purchase

Norton Ghost v9 -- Synmantic Purchase of Powerquest

Paragon Drive-Backup

Dantz Retrospect Pro

Acronis True Image v8

Iomega Automatic Backup

NovaBACKUP

Second Copy

BackUp MyPC

Handy Backup

Genie Backup Manager Pro

Others ......

[Inray]

I cannot suggest an imaging backup because i don't use them. Data backup, is something i really use everyday.

Second Copy used to be an excellent idea but author has stopped its development, so don't expect advanced features like CDRW support, 64bit zip archiving and the rest.

BackupMyPC looks quite professional but uses proprietary backup format. It also installs a device filter driver to access CDRW drives, something that cause trouble because of incompatibilities with other system drivers.

Genie used to be my company's choice as a data backup solution. v4 and the latest Pro v5 is very good product, stable and very fast indeed. The problem with GBP, even the latest Pro version, is that it doesn't support 64bit ZIP deflate. That limits single archive file size to less than 2GB.

My favorite backup program, is Backup4All. Same size as GBM, has more professional features, like 64bit zip file support, built-in CDRW/DVD burning, backup versioning, all strategies (incr, diff, mirror) and advanced logging and statistics. I registered it for my personal jobs, and never regreted. Even the company i work for, switched from Genie to Backup4All because of zip64 and excellent support from authors.

[brian873]

Hi Inray,

Depending on your configuration will determine what best suits your needs.

Ask yourself

1- What is my backup device?

2- How often will I backup?

3- Will you use the backup data for archive or reference ?

4- What is the data I will backup?

a. What is the average file size?

Let me know this and I will try and recommend something for you.

Hail Hail

[FAT64]

Acronis is well blinging, man!!!

[CoffeeFiend]

Ghost hands down. BTW, Symantec (not Synmantic) didn't buy this from PowerQuest at all. It used to be from Binary Research. Next on the list, perhaps DriveImage or Acronis...

[ChunkDog]

Acronis True Image is the best I've used. It's very easy to use/setup. The only problem is that when you make a floppy set to boot from, it's like 6 disks, and the only reason I like to use floppy is because I can have one hard drive per IDE controler, this makes imaging the hard drive faster, but if you have a board with RAID, or like a PCI promise card, you can still have one hard drive per controller, and then boot Acronis from a CD. So enough Rambling, I would recamend Acronis True Image.

[magicfly]

Drive Image 7 rulez the scene

[shuangyefei]

I use norton ghost and acronis true image

[berrios-zipline]

Thanks for the info,

I think I will try Dantz. I hear it can do incremental backups which run faster. I like complete system backups since the PC world is a hobby for me and I work all day with UNIX.

RTM