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Norton Ghost or "System Recovery" (1 Viewer)

Jay H

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I was recommending my sister who does autocad work for a very small design firm (more or less, my sister and her boss/owner), to invest in a system recovery program which is probably cheaper than paying for tech support and easier/better than trying to restore a system from a hard drive crash or a virus, etc.

She runs Windows 7 (not sure the exact OS specs) but I mentioned Norton Ghost since I'm somewhat familiar. She doesn't have a super fast or super new hi-tech laptop so it doesn't have to be the most powerful version or so but after a little searching, it seems Ghost is not supposed anymore from Symantec although they have an Enterprise edition available on their website and there is Ghost 15 which is mostly to support Win 8.1... They seem to be pushing their newer "system recovery" and I'm just curious if anybody have any good xp's or bad with the new product and/or Ghost.. I searched on Norton System Recovery and found mixed reviews. It seems most of the bad reviews were more power users who have the latest and greatest and had problems getting S.R. to support... I don't think my sister would have that issue...

Any experiences? Thanks!

Jay
 

Stan

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Used to use "Ghost" 6-7 years ago. Supported and tested software for various customers who couldn't afford to upgrade from XP, Server 2000 or 2003, etc. Ran about 30 servers, constantly stripping them down and re-installing from ghost images to match unique configurations.

I found it to be a very stable and reliable. Things may have changed, but at that time it was a very good product. Of course with hw/sw changes, that's ancient history now.
 

Clinton McClure

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Jay - Here's the funny thing about using Ghost 15 with Windows 7: It's my experience that you can create a backup image using it, but you can't restore from it. Same problem with Microsoft's Windows Backup solution. It's half-baked and fails most of the time. The company I work for uses Acronis for bare metal backups (full system images) and have done so with great success for a number of years. Over the past 8 years, I have personally used Acronis 9 with Windows NT 4.0 and XP, Acronis 10 with XP and Windows 7 and Acronis 11.5 with Windows Server 2008 and I've yet to encounter a problem.
 

Jay H

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Thanks Clinton, I have not heard of Acronis, but I just checked out version 9 and it looks interesting. I would need something easy to use for the average user. Her demands are not terribly high (autocad user but I normally do tech support for her when I'm there), How much is Acronis? I'll do more research on it for sure...Jay
 

Jay H

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I downloaded Acronis True Image 2015 and not terribly impressed. Although I only started a full disk image backup to their Acronis Cloud, the upload seemed awfully slow. And they only support their Cloud service which of course is fee based. Just looking at reviews, it seems a lot of iffy reviews on 2015 versus the older versions. For my sister, it most likely wont make a difference.

I downloaded a trial version of Macrium Reflect and that seemed a lot more robust and faster. Both support encrpypted image backups but with Macrium, it seems I can upload to any Cloud service.. Though I imagine one could image to a file so long as you have the disk space and then you can use any Cloud service anyway...

Anybody have anything good or bad to say about Macrium 5.3? I am running Windows7 64-bit.. but I think my sister has the 32-bit Win7 for compatability..

Jay
 

Clinton McClure

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Sorry you weren't impressed with Acronis. I don't use cloud storage for backup images, just a portable USB3 HDD. I can't fathom trying to backup and restore a multi-GB disk image from a cloud service. (Most of the computers I image at work create a 10-15 GB file and I can have the computer back to a running state within minutes locally compared to hours via cloud.)
 

Jay H

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Well, my sister has a usb drive but I think it's older USB, probably not 2.0 or so... I'll have to ask... But she also has a google drive account. I'd almost want to backup a hard drive to 2 sources, at least this is because she uses her laptop for work....

I think Acronis removed a ton of tools and stuff from 2014 to make a simpler interface and stuf, but I'm just reading a lot of bad reviews online and I saw some of the cons with the trial version... I saw somebody mention Macrium so I went and dl'ed their trial version... I felt the UI was better and it seemed more robust. I'm not likely to buy an "old" version and a lot of folks seemed t have bad reviews of Acroni' customer service..

Jay
 

mattCR

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I'm a huge believer in Acronis True Image, which I've used for all business level servers & workstations for years. It just works. I don't use the 2014/2015, I'm using the Corporate Workstation Edition, I'm not sure of the differences
Remember, it's a bare metal image, and not designed for single file recovery/etc. as a disaster plan.
So, get a snapshot now and again to preserve software installs and state against replacement.

For file level protection, you're far better off with something designed for it like Crashplan tends to be far preferred.
 

Jay H

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I set up my sister with Macronis Reflect v5.3 for Win 7 x64 and most everything went pretty smooth. I even found a coupon for 20% off. I set up both XML and VBS scripts so she can do full image backups and full/differential backups of her Autocad drawings and Word documents from her desktop. She's got a WD USB based external hard drive (USB 1.1 or perhaps 2.0, I don't recall) that backed up about 406gbs of data to about 215gbs compressed in about 4 hours... Other than having to run chkdsk before the actual image copy, it worked really well. And their tech support is nice and responsive. I sent them a few questions before purchase which they were pretty quick to respond and I got a human on the first email...

Jay
 

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