Acronis & Paragon imaging software question

[JAG Computers]

When I use either Acronis Backup & Recovery™ 10 Workstation or Paragon Drive Backup 10 Workstation and backup and/or image a hard drive using my rosewill adapter am I able to restore an image from the master drive to a new drive and still have the drive boot when I place it back in the original machine?

Paragon wants me to buy the technicians license for this and I refuse to do that. I should not have to spend $799 just to do imaging and backups. I do not plan to install the software on any other machine as it is.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

 

[ATTech]

Forgive my ignorance, I've haven't used these programs that much, but is that not the whole point of the program? Create a back-up image, restore the image to a new drive, and boot it up in the computer? What part of that are these programs not allowing you to do? There are plenty of options for imaging drives, some free such as clonezilla, so I'm wondering what aspects do these programs provide that the alternatives don't?

 

[parker.casey]

As I've been saying for a while now ... OpenSource tools are very often the best, and they aren't free because they have no value. They are free because the folks who code opensource tools most often are coding them so that they can get their job done. Making money with the tool, not making money from the tool.

If there's a FOSS way, it's probably going to be the same or better than the expensive way. That being said ... Acronis actually does offer an added value with Universal Restore.

 

[DCGPX]

When I use either Acronis Backup & Recovery™ 10 Workstation or Paragon Drive Backup 10 Workstation and backup and/or image a hard drive using my rosewill adapter am I able to restore an image from the master drive to a new drive and still have the drive boot when I place it back in the original machine?

Paragon wants me to buy the technicians license for this and I refuse to do that. I should not have to spend $799 just to do imaging and backups. I do not plan to install the software on any other machine as it is.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Whilst I have sympathy, the use of home/personal programmes for business use is in violation of their licence. I hate paying the prices for tech licence as well which is why I only have a very small number of them.

I try and find an open source equivalent first.

I'll freely admit when I started out I used Home versions as far cheaper, but that was in workshop, I wouldn't want 'Home' splashing up in front of a client. But as I started getting Business work and impractical to take PC away I got tech versions to stay legal and creditable.
I wouldn't be alone in this initial approch either I bet.

In answer to your question though - Yes you can as its an image and when drive put in as master it should boot up as normal

 

[MobileTechie]

So which open source imaging alternatives are equivalent to Acronis/Paragon?

By equivalent I mean it should:

Run on Windows rather than just a boot disk or linux
Do disk cloning
Make and restore images
Be able to exclude files from the image
Be able to restore to different size/proportional partition schemes
Do both raw and non-raw imaging.
Include image compression for non-raw images.

 

[ATTech]

I guess I'll pitch the WAIK/ImageX route...

Run on Windows rather than just a boot disk or linux

Can be run within windows, or scripted into a PE disk. It's command line driven, so with some simple programming knowledge, it can be fully customized.

Do disk cloning

Yup.

Make and restore images

Yup.

Be able to exclude files from the image

Not specifically, but the image can be mounted and files can be removed. This can be done manually or through scripts.

Be able to restore to different size/proportional partition schemes

Yup. It's used a file based format, so partitioning isn't handled by the program. The diskpart tool can handled the partitioning and is also command line driven, so with the proper scripting, it can be automated however you like it.

Do both raw and non-raw imaging.

It's file-by-file, rather than sector-by-sector, so it doesn't handle raw imaging, but how often does that really make a difference?

Include image compression for non-raw images.

Yup.

I don't come across too many situations where a raw sector-by-sector image is needed and a file-based image won't work, so ImageX works great. If I do, then I use Clonezilla.

 

[MobileTechie]

With ImageX, although there is a crossover in many areas and in fact it is probably a superior method to meet many of the situations we face I still don't think is an exact equivalent. If you get a system in with a dodgy drive you want to take a sector-based image because using the file system makes the disk head thrash about and is more likely to result in the demise of the disk. Out of interest, how does imagex deal with bad sectors?

Also the sector imaging is a very fast and useful way of taking a snapshot of a client system before you start work and can fully restore the entire system precisely as it was if need be including boot sectors, MBR etc etc. You don't really want to be messing around with scripting diskpart etc when a ready made app can do it all in a press of a button.

Your posts about imagex have piqued my interest in it I must say. I'm not wishing to push sector-based imaging vs file based but for the purposes of this post I'm kind of interested to know if there really is an open source sector-based imaging tool that is the equivalent of Acronis et al. Clonezilla is pretty much a direct equivalent but it's not a Windows product and many techs have just the one Windows bench machine.