Backup Solutions

Discussion in 'Software' started by Fergal1982, Jul 27, 2007.

  1. Fergal1982

    Fergal1982 Petabyte Poster

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    What do you use?

    I've heard that Ghost and Acronis True Image 10 are the two main competitors.

    Not sure what I should pick, although PC-Pro recommends Acronis over Ghost though.

    Whichever one I get, should I pick up a large external USB drive to use as my backup location?
     
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  2. BosonMichael
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    BosonMichael Yottabyte Poster

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    I used BackupExec 10 at my last job for our servers, and we used Ghost to take PC images. I used Ghost at home, but it started making my PC crash - removed Ghost, and crashes went away... funny how that works. ;) Now, I just copy my important data to an external drive.
     
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  3. MacAllan

    MacAllan Byte Poster

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    At home I use Mozy - let someone else worry about it....
     
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  4. Fergal1982

    Fergal1982 Petabyte Poster

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    I think the advantage with Acronis/Ghost is the images, for me at least.

    I quite like to regularly wipe my system and start from scratch. Doing it all manually takes me weeks to get back to speed. with one of those, I can make an image that has most of what I use installed. That way when I wipe it takes significantly less time to get back up to speed.

    Some of the things I like (with the workstation version of Acronis) is the networked backups, controlling all the backups from a single location. It makes it easier to manage.

    Also, the 'universal remote' function is quite cool it seems. Costs extra, but you basically run the restore on any machine, pick an image to use, and it installs it, replacing all the drivers, etc, so that the system will work even if the 'new' machine is totally different to the one the image was taken from. The advantage of this can be quite handy. For a start it allows a 'universal' image deployment across a company that uses different hardware, rather than a standard kit. Secondly, if you are supporting an App and a user is having a problem, you can just image their machine, and restore it into a virtual machine - giving you total freedom to test the system out at your leisure, without interrupting the user and preventing them from doing something else.

    Ghost is supposed to have an integrated method of converting an image to a VM, but Acronis doesnt (apparently - so putting it onto a VM isnt exactly straightforward). However, I've heard several people talk about Ghost, saying that it crashed their system and/or corrupted their images too often.
     
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  5. BosonMichael
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    BosonMichael Yottabyte Poster

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    The only problem with doing that is... by the time I wipe my system, my apps and drivers have usually changed significantly. For example, when I first installed my system, I installed an application that works with my Rio Cali MP3 player. What if I didn't have that player anymore? I'd rather not have it installed at all rather than uninstall it... as you know, traces of apps and drivers tend to get left behind when you uninstall them... in any case, uninstalling something rarely leaves your system as clean as if it had never been installed in the first place.

    For me, a wipe-and-reinstall makes me take a step back and ask myself, "Do I really *need* that app installed? Doing so ultimately results in a cleaner (and faster!) system than if I simply accept the image of what I installed six months, a year, or several years ago.
     
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  6. Theprof

    Theprof Petabyte Poster

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    Backup exec for where I work.
     
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