Acronis TrueImage vs. MigrateEasy question (1 Viewer)

[Dennis Nicholls]

I'm starting to get concerned. My old Dell PC / Win XP SP3 is trucking along fine and I perform file backups with One Care every so often. But the hard disc has been running since 2001 (!) and I know these things don't last forever.

I'm mulling over "image backup" and migration to a new disc as strategies. Discs are cheap - 500GB for $55. So I'm thinking maybe just migrate to a new disc and retire the old one to a box on the shelf.

Acronis has two products: True Image Home 2009 for $49 and Migrate Easy 7.0 for $39. Obviously Migrate Easy will do what I want. The documentation for True Image isn't clear: does it include essentially a copy of Migrate Easy along with the image backup/restore utilities? Or would I have to backup to a THIRD disc, install the new boot disc, and restore to that?

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I found my own answer. On page 103 of the True Image manual it describes how to "clone" a disc, which is the same thing as "migrating" a disc. Why they heck don't they keep a consistant name for such things? :rolleyes

 

[Clinton McClure]

I use both Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image at work and I also use True Image at home. It's fairly easy to use.

I haven't used a 1:1 migration program, so my experience is strictly with image backup. For that, I would recommend getting a portable or external HDD, making an image of your Dell and putting it on there for safe keeping. Keep using your Dell until it goes kablooey and then swap out internal HDDs and restore the image from the portable (or external) to the new internal HDD. That way, if your PC is taken out by lightning or a power surge, you always have a compressed image backed up remotely.

Of course, if you have a 1:1 migration program which performs a full image transfer, you can go that route too. The only thing you lose is the remote backup.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

As I said I'll probably build the new disk and use it, retiring old Betsy as it were. I then can perform image backups semi-annually to DVD-R as well as more frequent file backups.

I wonder what the record is for disk life?

 

[elec08]

Acronis True Image rules.

 

[Clinton McClure]

Don't know. My desktop is almost six years old and my laptop is four. We have PCs at work running Windows 3.1 with the original HDD. They run 24x7.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Going back a few years to my PC days, I always used Acronis
and thought it did a remarkable job. Saved my butt many times.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

I should have my copy and new disk by the end of the week.

It turns out that the most uncertain part of the whole evolution concerns the BIOS of my Dell Dimension 4300. Dell has dropped all product support for the 4300 from their website. :frowning: I had upgraded to BIOS v. A02 back when I upgraded to XP, but nowhere am I getting a straight story about going above the 137 GB limit. So I just bought a cheapo 80 GB drive. At least it's an upgrade from my existing disk, going from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm and having a much larger 8 MB cache too.

With any luck I can stall getting a new machine until Windows 7 is in SP2, bypassing Vista altogether.

 

[Grozzy]

I wonder what the record is for disk life? [/quote]

Hm...my disk is 5 years old and still works fine.

As for the name of this thread i would go for True image, because it can do what you need with no problem and has many other helpful features for your future needs. 10 $ more is not a problem.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

Well it seems to work. I'm running with the new disk as the system drive.

Annoyances with True Image. There's no paper manual included. Hey guys, the soft copy in PDF on the disk isn't any good if I'm trying to restore from a system hard crash.

Second annoyance. There's a second system reboot required before using the "clone" utility. This didn't phase me too much but it was unnerveing the first time when I attempted to run clone and the program went off into never-never land - no indications - for about a half-hour.

 

[Dennis Nicholls]

My cheapo $35 hard disk is a trooper. It's only 80 GB compared with my old disk of 40 GB, but the performance specs are much better. 8 MB cache vs. 2 MB. 7200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm. Average read seek of 8.9 ms vs. 12.8 ms. It's like buying a new system - I really notice a difference and especially at boot.

Andy Grozzy - one thing puzzles me. Western Digital no longer quotes MTBF numbers for either my legacy drive or the new one. Instead they state - for both drives - a "5 year design life". What the heck does that mean? My old drive was in use from 2001 to 2008 and was still going strong.