well, i have to politely disagree with this review, here is exp. with Acronis:
it would not get past the initial stage of backing up to CD…it failed to write to CD media that BackupMyPC 4.5 is able too…
That was a real show stopper for me, as I too am searching for a solution for backing up my TR1a, xp home system.
I’ve got BUMP (Backupmypc 4.5), as it’s known, supported by STOMP software actually working as advertised, but hell if I can figure out what it’s really doing and have as of yet, I have no faith in it as a complete disaster recovery system. Here’s why:
I don’t understand the difference between an incremental and differential backup. I have sucessfully created a 20 cd disaster recovery backup of my system as of a few weeks back. It’s all on CD and I can sucessfully restore individual files, as well as the system, presumably (but have not tested this, as I am leary of the product in general).
BUMP seems to be an outgrowth from the old days of tape backups and restores, and for this subnotebook user, the language seems arcane and way too much information. An advantage of Acronis - it seems to take a simple wizard approach to backups.
BUMP does verify all backups, doubling the time it takes to backup, which is lengthy, about 20 minutes per CD and for a full backup of my C and D drives to a file on my external hard drive, it takes about 3+ hours. Differencial/incremental backups are shorter, about 1.5 hours, but i can’t tell what it is really backing up even thought it does create a log of everything it is doing. There just isn’t enough understandable user information on the procedure…ie. once you have a full backup, what do you do then. Incremetals daily, creating a new backup set? Or differntials overwriting an older backup set? I haven’t a clue. There is just a confusing explaination on what one is over another, but no strategy suggestions in the help file. The documentation assumes you are a systems admin from the 60’s.
I personally would prefer GHOST or IMAGE DRIVE from powerquest, but the former is not yet available in 2004 version (website says it was due out first week in October, but it’s still not there) and the former is so large it would take days to download, and it ain’t cheap. As I understand these programs, they work at the image (partion) level, which seems a more straightforward approach to me. I have not heard anything about either of them supporting our CD/RW drive, so I am a bit leary about that. It would be great to hear from folks using these products on a tr1 platform.
For now, I will keep experimenting with BUMP (a cracked copy, but willing to pay them once I am sure the solution works for me).
jig
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