I want to marry Acronis True Image (screw Apple)

[Winnow]

Thank freaking hey-soos for Acronis True Image.

I've been hot swapping hard drives like mad the past few days while working on installing Leopard. I finally managed to screw up my main hard drive with my Vista OS on it.

First of all, I completely blame Apple. For some god damned reason, my iTunes gave me a message that my iPod was in restore mode. I update Itunes to latest version, update my ipod to latest firmware and nothing. It keeps telling me my iPod is in restore mode no matter how many times I restore it. The iPod itself was working fine and I could see and use the files. Of course after restoring it, it was blank, but still working fine.

After researching the web, there's no solution to the problem at Apple's official site or any fan geek site. Wondering wtf was up, I booted into Leopard to see if iTunes there would recognize it. Sure enough, my iPod was recognized fine in Leopard. Having wasted plenty of time in Vista trying to get my iPod recognized (Apple's fault, not Vista's...nothing changed in Vista for my iPod not to be recognized), I decided to pop in my main HD along with Leopard so I could copy over my iTunes folder and at least sync the bastard up for use tomorrow. Well, After rebooting Leopard, my Vista OS wasn't recognized (Leopard probably sabotaged the drive), so I switch the drive boot order again in my Bios to boot into Vista and get a disk read error. I try a few HD slots and hard rebooting etc with no luck. Not too happy at this point.


Thankfully, my last Vista backup was on the 19th of October right after installing my Wacom Bamboo Fun thingy. So I pop in the Acronis recovery DVD, it boots up, finds the 750GB HD that my Vista Backups are on, and sees my main OS drive. I get info on my OS drive and the response is that it has a corrupted index. Whew. I place my iTunes directory, giganews download folders, etc etc all outside my C partition so restoring my Vista OS drive only results in a week's loss of emails and a couple bookmarks I made.

My OS and MBR are restored in 15 minutes and Vista boots right back up like nothing happened (except for a lost week). Sooooooooo nice. Not having a recent backup (or any backup) would have = multiple days of installing and reconfiguring all the crap I have setup. Major pain. 15 min > ~20 hours (and probably more as I would miss stuff I'd have to reconfig or install later)

Bottom line: make your OS partition 50GB or less and back it up at least once a month. The resulting backup file will take less than 10 minutes to complete (you can even keep working while it backs up the OS partition you're currently running) and be about 20GB in size for ~30GB of data (just checked mine).

Reinstalling iTunes (pre crash) didn't help (which is no surprise after a retro week old iTunes didn't work either). I even reset some registry settings which was one of Apple's suggestions.

It's not a complete happy ending though. Even though I restored Vista from an Image a week old, and iTunes was working fine with my iPod all the way up until today, the piece of shit iTunes still keeps telling me my iPod needs to be restored, even after restoring again and again, switching USB ports, etc. I have no idea why Apple sucks so much. I actually had these kind of issues with my old Nano as well, along with freezing episodes where I'd have to reset the nano.

One person on the net says it's an unresolved firmware issue so I'm screwed until a new firmware is released for the iPod Nano or, I'll have to copy over my iTunes info to Leopard and reboot into that OS to update my Nano.

My old Nano is recognized with no problem so it's not a USB port issue. The new Fatty seems to function normally, I can see all the settings, etc.

...taking my old Nano to work tomorrow. No video for me! Lame

[Animalor]

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/30/mini ... less-smug/

Check out the Icon that OSX uses for Windows computers on the network..

[Aardor]

For years, I have been saying itunes is a terrible program, without ever using it and trying it myself. Now that I have an ipod, I have really only confirmed that view. But besides that, you're freaking blaming apple because for screwing up your boot sector, when you have installed/altered their operating system to work on a computer it wasn't made for (i.e. a non-apple computer?) The only person to blame is yourself.

Acronis does sound pretty sweet though.

[Fash]

Acronis is awesome, but you really have nothing to bitch about, as said above.

You probably fucked up your ipod by using it with leopard in the first place, and there probably is a way to fix it (by actually putting your ipod in restore mode and plugging it in)

I use true image religiously... praise it for saving your ass, but don't blame apple for screwing it up... the shit we're messing around with trying to get mac to work on our pc's is not stable.

[Animalor]

Have you tried doing a reboot of your ipod?

From the main menu, press and hold Menu and the center button together for 10 seconds or so until the Apple logo appears.

This doesn't wipe your Nano and has solved some issues for me.

[Aardor]

Oh, also, you could have fixed your vista image by popping in the vista CD, booting from it, and telling it to repair. Though, this might have screwed up OSX, but who knows. Additionally, the same problem would have happened if you installed XP after vista.

[Boogahz]

I'm just surprised that you actually connected your iPod to the Leopard install while you were being careful to keep other drives away from it.

[Winnow]

I never attached my iPod while Leopard was booted. I only did this last night after extensive attempts to get it to work in Windows.

I'm not blaming Apple for my disk read error. That's most likely my fault as I've hot swapped hard drives many many times over the past week and probably popped it out of my drive bay while it was writing accidentally.

OSX10.5 is on a completely different hard drive than Vista and I don't even have the two drives in my PC at the same time (except for the last attempt which was to copy iTunes data folder over). (I blame Apple for everything. In this case, I was kidding)

I do reboot my Nano(s). I had to reboot my old Nano about 90% of the time after updating it with the week's podasts. It would freeze while accessing the first podcast I tried to listen to, I'd do the reboot, and it would work find after that. With my new fatty Nano, I haven't had to reboot it, up until yesterday, and I rebooted it many time last night, along with installing the new firmware like 10 times as iTunes kept saying that it needed to be restored. I hae the latest iTunes and firmware on both of my Nanos. Usually, I might suspect a USB port conflict but my old Nano works fine so I can rule that out which leaves me stuck on options to fix things. I know my Fatty Nano works on other ITunes installs, I know my USB port works, all firmware/Itunes software is up to date. I reinstalled ITunes, reset registry settings....so, for some reason, Vista won't recognize my new Nano, even after restoring a week old version of the OS which was working perfectly.

I'll look into it more tonight. I know there was a problem if you didn't "eject" your iPod from ITunes as Vista/Windows would keep assigning new drive letters until they filled up or something like that, but that's not the problem either.

I would love to dump iTunes and I very well may as I've had my fill of issues with Apple's shoddy software/firmware. I hear the new Zune software handles podcasts now. If I can find software that updates and syncs podcasts to iPods well, I can use iTunes just for searching purposes to track down podcasts of interests and then enter the podcast info into another program for updates and syncs.

[Winnow]

Problem solved.

Solution:

Leave your iPod connected and reboot windows.

I found this solution on some obscure yahoo Australian mac help page. Seems like I'd be a nice easy suggestion for Apple to list on their official forums.

Worked.

[Aardor]

Haha, wtf?

Yeah, I didn't catch your humor at all about apple messing up your boot sector. I wonder when i'll be able to use my iTouch with Vista x64...Vista can run 32 bit programs natively (unlike XP x64).

Does cover flow lag for you?, Maybe it's just much more smooth with the touch interface, but I feel like i'm using a 286 when i try to use this feature.

[Winnow]

Does cover flow lag for you?, Maybe it's just much more smooth with the touch interface, but I feel like i'm using a 286 when i try to use this feature.

Cover flow is almost a cool way to view images and a series of images. It doesn't lag for me (unless I'm accessing images on a network drive) but the image takes too long to render. You get a slightly blurry image and then about 2 seconds later it clears up. Also, I had cover flow maxed on my portrait display and when viewing landscape images, it cut the side off. I could read some all-portrait series of images like that but the 2 second delay in rendering the image takes care of that idea.

Nice idea for comic reading, etc but not ready for prime time. I hope someone makes a more workable version in windows.

What I've noticed so far with Leopard is that it looks nice and works but the customization options are almost nil for power users. To be fair, Im using the built in apps of Leopard and I assume there's better apps out there as I don't use the built in image view in Vista or even the file manager.

And here's another lame thing. I go up to access the Safari menus way up in the left corner and accidentally click the desktop...well that unselects safari and the menus poof...so I have to go back to the app (where I should be in the first place) , select the window, then go back to the upper left corner of my screen to select menus. Lame. lame. crazy lame. How do they get away with this?

The back button on my mouse doesn't move me back in Safari either...I'm hoping there's a fix for that. They can't be that crazy as to not allow forward/back convenience buttons on mice in Leopard (which is integrated into everything in Windows/Vista)

[noel]

Oh btw. Fuck Safari! A lot of die-hard Mac users don't even use it. It's not a bad browser, but do yourself a favor and grab Firefox!

[Zaelath]

And here's another lame thing. I go up to access the Safari menus way up in the left corner and accidentally click the desktop...well that unselects safari and the menus poof...so I have to go back to the app (where I should be in the first place) , select the window, then go back to the upper left corner of my screen to select menus. Lame. lame. crazy lame. How do they get away with this?

That shits me to tears as well, as does the way clicking the "full screen" button has behaviour that is determined by the app. If I click "full screen" I don't mean "full screen except for an inch on the right". Bastards.

[Moonwynd]

I met with a sales guy and an SE from Acronis last week - they flew out from Boston to meet with me. I had been evaluating Acronis for a while now. Since our organization uses VMWare extensively...and Acronis has some great P2V and V2P options on top of their already great product...looks like I will be recommending Acronis for our organization.

I must say the V2P option is astounding. To be able to move from a VM to a real box so easily is going to help us out immensely.

[Winnow]

I must say the V2P option is astounding.

I don't know what the means but I'll let you use Acronis. She's still all mine though!

Acronis (True Image and Disk Director) is good stuff. Although I screwed up my attempt to restore my Vista image to a VMWare Virtual Machine, I know it can be done. I'll try it again some other time! I messed up the repair stage (fixes all he drive problems you run into by installing a backup of a Vista partition that is setup for a particular MB, etc, into a Virtual Machine) and wrote a fresh copy of Vista over my restored fully loaded image.

[Winnow]

Acronis True Image Home 2010 is out.

This one is Windows 7 compatible.


http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pr ... trueimage/

I'd been using the Acronis recovery disk to make my OS backups with Windows 7 but now I'm good to go again.

Acronis continues to amaze me with it's speed. I backed up my entire OS partition (about 40GB atm which resulted in a 26.9 GB backup file) in less than 5 minutes and I think it was closer to 4 minutes. I'm sure having an SDD HD has something to do with that but it's fast even without one.

I've decided to try the new Continuous backup feature in Home 2010:

Acronis Nonstop Backup™ automatically creates incremental backups every five minutes allowing users to roll back their system, files, and folders to any point in time in the past.

It's basically similar to Apple's Time Machine. I'm going to test it out for a month and see if it lags me at all by making incremental backups every 5 mins. There doesn't seem to be a way to adjust the timeframe for backups. If I could, I'd probably make it 15 mins or even once an hour. I suppose having it every 5 mins will be useful when I accidentally delete a long post I'm writing but don't really see the need for that frequent of backups. There's and easy way to START/STOP the Nonstop backup by clicking on the mini Icon in the taskbar so it's easy to turn off if you think it will impact game performance or something else.

I'm still sticking with an app called "Second Copy" to automatically backup individual folders etc on a specified time frame. Ever since losing my monster collection of art I've been more cautious about this stuff.

Acronis True Image is a great app. It had a few versions where it got a a little bloated but this new Home 2010 version is slick and the added features nice.

New in Acronis True Image Home 2010

Acronis Nonstop Backup –

Near-CDP (Continuous Data Protection) is now available to Acronis True Image Home users. You will be able to revert your documents to previous states in time. This may come in handy when you accidentally deleted an important document or made some corrections that turned out to be wrong and you need to return the document to the state in which it was, for example, two weeks ago. When you need to recover a file, a Windows Explorer-like browser with integrated search makes searching for a file you need to recover very easy. But Acronis Nonstop Backup is much more than a versioning tool. It also provides for recovering your system if you ever need that.

Online backup –

you can make your critically important data much more secure by storing it off-site. Because files are stored on a remote storage, they are protected even if your computer gets stolen or your house burns down. So the risk of data loss as a result of fire, theft, or other natural disasters is practically eliminated. And you can safely recover any corrupted, lost or deleted files on your computer. Integrating Online backup into Acronis True Image Home provides a single solution for all your data backup needs.

Powerful scheduler -

The scheduler became more powerful and flexible. We expanded the set of already existing scheduling options. The new scheduler allows you to specify the date when a scheduled task should run for the first time. While scheduling a monthly task, you can use a month calendar for specifying the date (e.g. 1st day of the month) or dates for running the task (e.g. on 10th, 20th, Last day of the month). If you do not need to run a scheduled task for some time, but intend to use it again in the future, you can disable the task for the time being and then re-enable it when required. So it is not necessary to recreate the task from scratch. You can clone a scheduled task and then introduce some minor changes into the duplicate. This may be useful when creating several similar tasks. In combination with a selected backup method and automatic consolidation rules, the scheduler allows implementing various backup strategies.

Selective validation –

Earlier versions of Acronis True Image Home could validate only a whole backup archive. Sometimes this may be inconvenient. Suppose, you have a full backup archive with a size of 20GB and a longish chain of differential backups having sizes of several gigabytes each and amounting to 100GB. In this case Acronis True Image Home validated the whole 120GB archive and this could take quite a long time. Now the program will validate just a single selected differential backup and the full one.

Support of dynamic/GPT disks (purchased separately) –

operations with dynamic/GPT disks expand the range of hard drive configurations supported by Acronis True Image Home. Dynamic disks offer greater flexibility for volume management and may provide benefits in computers with more than one hard drive. GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a new hard disk partitioning scheme providing advantages over the old MBR partitioning scheme. It was introduced as a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) initiative.

VHD format support –

Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) is a file format containing the complete contents and structure representing a hard disk drive. Furthermore, Windows Backup utility included into Windows Vista (except Home editions) and Windows 7 operating systems now uses this format for backing up an image of the system hard drive when users select the "Complete PC Backup" option. Acronis True Image Home can convert vhd files into tib files and vice versa, recover operating system from vhd files, and even boot from vhd images of Windows 7.

Booting from tib images containing Windows 7 –

Users of the Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate can boot from a tib image containing a backup of their system partition. This will allow testing the bootability of the backed up system without actual recovery. If the operating system boots from the tib file, then it will definitely boot after recovery from that tib file.

There's also a Try and Decide mode which seems interesting but not sure I'll use. From what I gather, it maintains two images of your OS. You can select "try" mode before installing something (hacked, questionable software etc) and see how it runs or if it screws up your system. If not, you apply the changes and Acronis moves it over to your main OS. I'm not sure how useful this would be while also having the continuous working as you could easily restore your system to before the install to within 5 minutes of installing the bad software.

Try & Decide™After starting the Try&Decide mode, you can safely install any system updates, drivers and applications without worrying about what might happen to your system. If anything goes wrong, you can simply discard the changes made in the Try&Decide mode.

BTW, I explored one of my old backups today to track down a log file that was within my OS partition and lost when I upgraded to x64 Windows 7. Acronis makes it easy to browse through your backup file trees and recover individual files/folders etc.

Well worth using this for peace of mind and the inevitable HD/system crash.

[valryte]

Acronis has done what I thought would never happen....it has disappointed me Dam them!

Basically, any time I try to make an image, it locks up and eventually causes Windows 7 to reboot. I did a search, and I'm not the only one reporting instabilities with True Image Home 2010. The Microsoft one so far has worked, it's just a pain because if I don't want to overwrite the previous image, I have to manually rename it. I hope they get their crap figured out.

[Winnow]

Acronis has done what I thought would never happen....it has disappointed me Dam them!

Basically, any time I try to make an image, it locks up and eventually causes Windows 7 to reboot. I did a search, and I'm not the only one reporting instabilities with True Image Home 2010. The Microsoft one so far has worked, it's just a pain because if I don't want to overwrite the previous image, I have to manually rename it. I hope they get their crap figured out.

Ack! That's a bummer. 2010 has worked great for me on Windows 7. I even have the "Persistent Backup" on that makes a continuous timeline of backups every 5 minutes.

It's been very smooth for me even with the constant backup option.

[valryte]

I can't blame them because I am having one other issue with Windows 7, but nothing else reacts as bad as Acronis. I won't derail the thread on it, I'll post it under a Windows 7 thread.

[Winnow]

I got lazy and hadn't made a backup since Feb '2010 of my OS partition.

well, I also got lazy and clicked on an .exe I shouldn't have (inconceivable!) and had to restore my PC.

Grats me for having to update my system since its state from 4 months ago. Thankfully I've learned to keep a lot of my important app settings off of the OS partition (Newsleecher, etc are on truecrypt partition elsewhere). iTunes crap is on the iMac.

My system seems to be snappier than before the mishap. I guess I needed a Summer cleaning of my OS. Still, it's surprising how much some things change over a few months...and also nice to see that most of my App choices, etc have settled down. The most I've lost is recent bookmarks.

I'll take the time to once again praise Acronis True Image Home 2010. It reinstalled my OS partition in less than 20 minutes (98 GB) without a hitch, and, mostly while I wrote this post, made a fresh backup of my OS partition in ~10 minutes. (58 GB atm) I deleted 30 GB of games that were on my OS partition from back in Feb. Acronis backs up your OS without slow down or need for you to stop what you're doing. Keep in mind that my OS partition is an SSD so things are a little faster for me but Acronis is still super fast with old HDs.

Back to monthly backups for me. Going to set reminder on iPhone calendar. ~10 mins a month (if you're smart and have separate partition for your OS and it's not humongous in size) is well worth the time considering how much time is wasted reconfiguring/downloading/updating, etc.

[Aabidano]

I bought it a while back and am quite pleased, does a fantastic job.

[Winnow]

The gap between the head and the disk is about 40 atoms high

Yes. That’s how close the head comes to touching the disk surface. About 3 nanometers. That’s even smaller than a bacteria or a virus. The read/write head is incredibly small too - width of less than a 100 nanometers and a thickness of about 10, and it flies above the platter at a speed of up to 15,000 RPM.


To get things into perspective, Tom’s Hardware makes a comparison of the head with an aircraft. If the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth:

* The head would fly at Mach 800
* At less than one centimeter from the ground
* And count every blade of grass
* Making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland.

The fastest Mach speed I could find was Mach 25 at 19,000+ miles per hour.

I'm amazed there aren't more HD crashes that there already are. I can't wait for there to be an semi affordable solid state storage solution in the TB range.

[Aabidano]

More fun with Acronis, used it to take a snapshot of my work WinXP laptop and turned that into a VMWare image that I can use on my main\home computer. Did it mainly as a backup system in case the laptop bit the big one. I store almost nothing for work locally so it's pretty easy to keep on top of backups.

Handy right now as the laptop is being swapped out and I can still work while I wait for the new one to come in from IT. Getting a core i5 T410, hope it's as good as the T60 was. Really wasn't anything wrong with the T60, other than the bits and pieces had all been spinning for 4 1/2 years.

[Bubba Grizz]

We are all on T60 and T61 laptops. However there are a few out there that are getting the T510 and the W510 laptops. Our rotation is longer now though due to the "economy". So I won't get a nicer laptop for a long while.

[Winnow]

I'm still using Acronis True Image Home 2010 that I was using in 2009.

I just backed up my OS partition ~50gb in less than 10 minutes. What a great product for peace of mind and so damn fast. I back my OS up to my mirrored raid drives now in my raid tower.

I'm just amazed at how fast it can copy 50GB. Any other way takes forever. I'm sure SSD helps but I'm writing to a standard HD. Acronis has saved my ass multiple times throughout the years.

[Aabidano]

Snapshots of my phone are great too, mainly since it's doing a disk image instead of a file copy. With something like 500k map tiles on my droid anything else takes a loooong time, restorations are much worse Acronis takes minutes.

[Winnow]

Acronis backed up my 90GB of data OS Windows 8 partition in less than 13 minutes and crunched it into a 57GB file. I've said it many times, but it still amazes me how fast it copies all of that data. I waited to do my first Windows 8 backup until things were settled in and I made sure stuff was working. Windows 8 turned out to be the lowest maintenance upgrade ever.

I did the online Windows 8 update without a install dvd. Go to Microsoft Online store/Paypal/Click Update/Wait for install/Done. Product Key gets emailed to you but you don't even need to type it in using the online process. It's definitely worth upgrading the the Pro version for 39.99 before January. Windows 8 Pro will be 199.99 after Jan 31st.(it's 69.99 retail box version right now until Jan 31st) 39.99 online win 8 pro lets you burn a, install DVD anyway so not sure why you'd get the other versions.

I'm finally planning to move my OS over to the 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD that has been unused in its box for many months and will use the 128GB SSD as a premade backup easy swap if something goes wrong so I can be back up and running right away. I need a little more breathing room for my OS partition and apps. The new SSD is faster as well.

[Aabidano]

New interface blows, simpler for a newb yes but only until you want to stray from their envisioned path. Not nearly as usable as the pre-2012 interface. I'll get over it.

[Winnow]

New interface blows, simpler for a newb yes but only until you want to stray from their envisioned path. Not nearly as usable as the pre-2012 interface. I'll get over it.

I'm still using the 2010 version. I'd only update if there was some sort of performance increase or incompatibility issue.

[Aslanna]

New interface blows, simpler for a newb yes but only until you want to stray from their envisioned path. Not nearly as usable as the pre-2012 interface. I'll get over it.

I'm still using the 2010 version. I'd only update if there was some sort of performance increase or incompatibility issue.

For a minute I thought you two were talking about Windows 8. Those two quotes fit perfectly!

[Winnow]

Windows 8 is a performance increase over Windows 7 as well as additional enhancements which make it a very nice OS update.

[Siji]

I like Acronis, but absolutely HATE the new 2013 interface. What the fuck people, quit making retarded interface "improvements".

[Aabidano]

I like Acronis, but absolutely HATE the new 2013 interface. What the fuck people, quit making retarded interface "improvements".

It's like having your web development team on staff and no one sane around to tell them "it works great now, leave it the hell alone". (Comes to mind seeing the latest improvements on the Verizon and Verizon Wireless sites, they've slowly been optimized to the point of un-usability.)

[Winnow]

Thanks again to Acronis True Image for saving my ass.

Awhile back I bought the new 2014 True Image. 2014 True image is pretty straight forward and hassle free.

My windows crapped out. Mostly my fault I think as I yanked out one of my raid drives (forgot the bottom 4 slots of my 8 raid tower had drives and not the top 4) That caused alarms to go off. I then updated my windows and then proceeded to uninstall a bunch of programs that weren't needed, all before restarting my PC. Something in that mix screwed up my OS and Windows couldn't repair the damage.

Thankfully I made a backup mid January of my OS partition. As usual, Acronis was super fast and restored 142 GBs in 15 minutes and I was up and running again.

The reason I was screwing with my Raid Tower was that I wanted to add an old 1 TB drive as a single JBOD to the tower. I'm getting low on space and that's partially why I wasn't doing regular monthly True Image back ups scheduled. Thankfully my backup was only 2 months old and I don't store crap on my C drive so only lost one app, Hearthstone I think that I'll reinstall. On a positive note, the backup was right after installing 8.1 update and before I fucked around with all of the Chinese storage apps so I can just install the 360 one I chose to stick with that I've manages to increase to 64TB of cloud storage so far.

I decided to go to Fry's and buy a 4TB hard drive. They're cheap. They are a better deal than the 1 and 2 TB drives per gigabyte. After a lot of hesitation, I bought a Seagate 4TB STBD4000400 for 179.00 (164.99 at Newegg). Those prices finally almost rival the 79.99 price I got for my four 2 TB drives years ago before the floods. You STILL can't get them that cheap again. I like the four 2TB Samsung drives I have and have had no problems. I've had my share with WD and Seagate. We'll see. It looks like Seagate is on the upswing for reliability while Hitachi bought by WD is heading a little south. It's a crapshoot. I'll test the 4TB seagate for a few months. If it holds up, I might pick up another and mirror them. For now, I added another 5 TB (minus formatting) storage space, although it's not protected/mirrored for now.

Acronis saved me hours and hours of reconfiguring and installing crap on my PC once again.