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Imaging software for system backup

Everyone needs some sort of backup and one type is imaging software that creates a large file that is a complete image of a particular drive or partition. For years I used Ghost, but as I remarked earlier, Symantec’s treatment of the program since they bought it leaves much to be desired. The same is true for Drive Image, which Symantec has folded into Ghost. I am not the only one complaining about Symantec. An article in Extreme Tech says

Ghost- This is perhaps the granddaddy of image backup tools. I started using Ghost around the version 5 timeframe, sometime before it was acquired by Symantec, the elephantine vendor of utility software. Ghost was great back in the day. It did what I wanted: backing up the image of the boot drive to a secondary drive. But as hardware progressed, Ghost had to evolve with it. That was fine, until Symantec got hold of it.

The author then goes on to recommend Acronis True Image. I am looking for an imaging program to use and I would appreciate any comments from readers who have used Acronis. The other imaging program that I know anything about is Image from Terabyte. I have downloaded a trial but it seems to be a slow program. Anyone else tried the Terabyte program or other imaging program?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Computer management, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Imaging software for system backup”

  1. joelmay Says:
    April 28th, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    I have used Acronis True Image (version 8.0) for more than a year. I use its scheduling feature to image my data partition nightly and my OS and program partitions weekly. The former is roughly 4.5GB and True Image takes approximately 12 minutes to create the image. The latter is larger (~7GB) and the image creation process takes 18 or 19 minutes.

    I have had two occasions to restore a partition using True Image. On both occasions the boot disk worked perfectly (and booted MUCH faster than the old PowerQuest Drive Image 7.0 that I used previously).

    Frankly, I have not tried Ghost (I don’t want anything Symantec on my system), but I am totally satisfied with True Image.

  2. Vic Says:
    April 28th, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    Thanks, Joel, for that helpful input.