Acronis TI vs B&R vs ShadowProtect

[JustInspired]

So I have Acronis True Image 2011 and 2013.
2013 is installed on our bench machine and I have a CD (bootable media) for each version.

We use the CDs a lot to image customers machines especially ones where removing the hard drive is a PITA . If the machine has a gigabit nic we'll use the FTP capability of the Acronis discs to drop the images straight onto our NAS RAID array.

If it's a low speed nic we'll use a USB 3.0 hard drive to dump the image onto. From there it's transferred to the NAS. We also sometimes use a Macrium bootable CD for this, being Macrium resellers and all, we would like to use it exclusively but it doesn't do FTP.

So, does the Backup and Recovery version do FTP?

Can it read True Image files and vice versa?

Apart from dis-similar hardware restore what benefit would there be in purchasing the B&R version?

Also, I've been thinking of getting Shadow Protect. Is the Shadow Protect CD any good for making backups of customers' machines or does it just do restores?

A lot of the time we'll pull the drive out of the customer's computer and stick it in one of the bench machine's drive bays. That way we can use the actual installed program but we really like having the bootable CD imaging option for drives we don't want to remove.

 

[hmig89]

Hi J,

Why not get both? Although if you want acronis for FTP you will need B&R workstation advanced edition.

Shadow protect I've had a trial for a few days and it seems to be really good, I use it mainly for backing up, and use acronis as my main imaging tool.

Whilst dissimilar hardware is a great feature I try to avoid doing it due the the registry settings, drivers etc that may be on the system from the previous setup.

 

[cyabro]

ShadowProtect won't fully do what you want unless you shell out for the very expensive IT Edition.
You could buy ShadowProtect Desktop Edition and install it on your workshop machine but that means that you can only run it on HDDs that are physically attached to that machine.
The recovery CD won't work on a machine that doesn't have an installed and activated copy of SHadowProtect on it.
The license you buy is for one machine only and can only be activated on one machine.

The IT Edition comes as a bootable USB stick that can be used on any machine you like, desktop or server.
You can run it inside the running OS or boot off the USB stick and run it, nothing gets installed on the machine you are imaging.
The IT Edition is licensed per technician and you can only run it on one machine at a time as the license checks for the USB stick.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Have you ever looked at Clonezilla? I've used Acronis, but started playing with Clonezilla, and it seems decent. I think it has options for using network locations as a repository also. Might be worth looking at. After all, open source. The times I've used it just creating an image on a local usb drive it's worked pretty well.

 

[JustInspired]

Have you ever looked at Clonezilla? I've used Acronis, but started playing with Clonezilla, and it seems decent. I think it has options for using network locations as a repository also. Might be worth looking at. After all, open source. The times I've used it just creating an image on a local usb drive it's worked pretty well.

I've used it a few times and it split the image up into a load of smaller files and dumped some other files in the folder too. A bit of a confusing mess.

I like the ease of Acronis and the ability to log into an FTP server from the boot CD. I also like the ease of mounting or browsing the image file on our bench machines.

Sometimes though, we'll use Macrium if we want to leave a particular customer with a browseable image of their machine in the state it was in before we nuked and paved it. We can then install the free version of Macrium Reflect for them to use for that purpose.

 

[Vicenarian]

Not mentioned, but also check out HDClone; I mainly use the Windows executable, but there's also a boot disc.