What imaging software do you use?

iisjman07 said:
^^
Thanks @ncient geek for taking the time to write all that up. Just two more I think I should mention: the unix tool 'dd' is very good for cloning drives, as well as Media Tools Pro which is *extremely good* (dare I say, the best?) for recovering from drives with faulty sectors because it can 'Reverse-Clone'. Usually I use 'dd' because I like using linux (and also I'm cheap :))
Click to expand...

ddrescue does the same thing as Media Tools Pro AFAIK
 
iisjman07 said:
^^
Thanks @ncient geek for taking the time to write all that up. Just two more I think I should mention: the unix tool 'dd' is very good for cloning drives, as well as Media Tools Pro which is *extremely good* (dare I say, the best?) for recovering from drives with faulty sectors because it can 'Reverse-Clone'. Usually I use 'dd' because I like using linux (and also I'm cheap :))
Click to expand...

Good grief, how could I have forgotten these two. I must have some corrupt sectors in my hard drive.

Mea culpa
 
Nice list... never heard some of those programs.. will have to look it to them.. But all i can say is stay away from driveimagexml... ouch....
 
@ncient geek said:
CloneZilla : If you know how to use, the absolute best. Need PhD or several years at NASA to fully understand the VAAAAST possibilities this software offers. Nothing is impossible, if you can load the drive you can clone it.
.
Click to expand...

PhD? It seems pretty simple to me, even walks you through it. Maybe I haven't explored some of the inner workings yet.
 
jaydude23 said:
+ 1. Easy to setup and easy to use.
Click to expand...

What version of True Image are you guys using? I upgraded to the latest 2010 a couple months back and am furious with Acronis about what a huge downgrade it's been. I've used older versions for years and been very happy. It seems that the 2010 version has an incredibly buggy/slow interface that makes my computer totally unresponsive for minutes at a time, and most annoying of all is a "feature" where if you get some kind of error/warning with a prompt (ignore/retry/cancel) it automatically selects "Cancel" after 10 minutes if you don't click something. I walk back into the room to see a screen that says "operation completed" and then when I look at the log, it says "canceled by user." It's truly maddening. Please let me know if anyone is aware of a fix for this auto-cancel problem. I've looked through the options and can't find anything other than "ignore bad sectors" which doesn't completely solve the problem.
 
Clonezilla IS tough to figure out. I thought I was saving an image to an external USB drive. As it turned out it saved it to the same C drive. :( I am afraid to use this software on a customer's computer. Any other paid or free offline image software worth looking into (specifically imaging from a boot CD)?
 
will all of these do sector-by-sector cloning?

I'm pretty good with Ghost, but I'm using an ancient version on a bootable CD

I'm always paranoid that I'll clone in the wrong direction and so I check 3 times to make sure I'm not about to cock it all up!!

Ideally I'd like to clone to an image file first, just to be totally sure! :)
 
I remember when Ghost first came out.. Stopped using it once norton got there hands on them..
 
RegEdit said:
Clonezilla IS tough to figure out. I thought I was saving an image to an external USB drive. As it turned out it saved it to the same C drive. :( I am afraid to use this software on a customer's computer. Any other paid or free offline image software worth looking into (specifically imaging from a boot CD)?
Click to expand...

Anything the first time is hard... once while helping my old roommate we were reinstalling windows and didn't realize in all microsofts infinite wisdom windows had decided that hey, you really do want two windows xp installs... and we'll even throw it over on that other drive you have inside... data? What data? Needless to say he lost a bit of music and other things.

I love Clonezilla or partimage.
 
mmanna said:
What version of True Image are you guys using? I upgraded to the latest 2010 a couple months back and am furious with Acronis about what a huge downgrade it's been. I've used older versions for years and been very happy. It seems that the 2010 version has an incredibly buggy/slow interface that makes my computer totally unresponsive for minutes at a time, and most annoying of all is a "feature" where if you get some kind of error/warning with a prompt (ignore/retry/cancel) it automatically selects "Cancel" after 10 minutes if you don't click something. I walk back into the room to see a screen that says "operation completed" and then when I look at the log, it says "canceled by user." It's truly maddening. Please let me know if anyone is aware of a fix for this auto-cancel problem. I've looked through the options and can't find anything other than "ignore bad sectors" which doesn't completely solve the problem.
Click to expand...

I upgraded to 2010 a few weeks ago and I must have imaged about 30 drives so far without any problems. I've just reverified a few of the images after reading your comments and everything has checked out OK. I've also restored some of the images on to fresh drives without a hitch. Maybe I've just been lucky so far!

Are you talking about the Windows Interface or the Boot Disk interface as I mainly use the boot disk.
 
mmanna said:
What version of True Image are you guys using? I upgraded to the latest 2010 a couple months back and am furious with Acronis about what a huge downgrade it's been. I've used older versions for years and been very happy. It seems that the 2010 version has an incredibly buggy/slow interface that makes my computer totally unresponsive for minutes at a time, and most annoying of all is a "feature" where if you get some kind of error/warning with a prompt (ignore/retry/cancel) it automatically selects "Cancel" after 10 minutes if you don't click something. I walk back into the room to see a screen that says "operation completed" and then when I look at the log, it says "canceled by user." It's truly maddening. Please let me know if anyone is aware of a fix for this auto-cancel problem. I've looked through the options and can't find anything other than "ignore bad sectors" which doesn't completely solve the problem.
Click to expand...

I'm using 2009 version. It seems to work well for me. I was thinking on giving the 2010 version a shot. Have you checked the Acronis website to see if there is a patch/update that addresses your problem?
 
Acronis OEM for system restore F11 on boot, seems slightly buggy but it works and the price was right
 
Thanks to @ncient geek for the software comparison! Saved me a lot of trial and error.
 
Acronis B&R 10 Advanced Workstation on Windows 7 x64. Hands down the best I've used, and the Universal Restore function is just the greatest thing ever for when a priority business client has a machine die. Restore the image to a completely different system, give it drivers, and good to go!

If I'm dealing with a bad/stubborn drive, I usually try DriveImageXML under Wine in Knoppix. If it's really stubborn, I just do a file backup with Unstoppable Copier under Wine in Knoppix.
 
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