To me, hard disk imaging is one of the most important thing to do after I’ve perfectly finished setting up a computer system the way I wanted. It is the best way of restoring the changes back to the way it was and also the best way to clone multiple computers with same hardware. I’ve always been using the good old Symantec Ghost for DOS version to do all that and only recently I’ve been using Macrium Reflect full edition on my new laptop because it was sponsored by Macrium.
Since Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition DOS version has never failed me, I never wanted to try out other products including the famous Acronis! However, many years has gone by and I believe the technologies that they used must have improved a lot. Will Symantec Ghost still remain as my favorite disk imaging software? Well I wanted to post this 2 weeks ago but was caught with Norton 15 being released and then Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Suite. Do note that I am only comparing shareware disk imaging software and the free ones are not included in the list. I hope that this comparison will be able to help you decide which disk imaging is worth buying.
Here are the list of disk imaging software that I have tested:
1. Acronis True Image Home 2010 (build 6.029) – Website
2. Active@ Disk Image v3.34 – Website
3. DriveClone Pro v7 – Website
4. Macrium Reflect v4.2 Build 2028 Full Edition – Website
5. Norton Ghost v15 – Website
6. O&O DiskImage Professional v4.1 Build 47 – Website
7. Paragon Drive Backup v9 Professional Build 8681 – Website
8. R-Drive Image v4.6 Build 4601 – Website
9. Windows 7 built-in Disk Imaging
10. StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop Edition v3.5 – Website
The testing was done on my desktop computer:
CPU: Intel Pentium D 2.80GHz
Mainboard: MSI 945P Platinum
Memory: 2GB DDR2
Hard Drive 1: 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s (Windows 7),
Hard Drive 2: 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s (Backup Location)
I wasn’t able to fully test Active@ Disk Image because the recovery disk feature is not available in the trial version. I emailed them to request for a full version to review but never gotten any reply from them.
Ghost 14 didn’t support Windows 7, so I waited for Ghost 15. When Ghost 15 was officially released last week, they said that they currently do not have any free copies available for the press. So I went ahead and paid $69.99 to purchase a full version for testing.
After finished testing Ghost 15, I then found out Paragon has recently replaced their Drive Backup Professional 9 with Backup & Recovery 10 Suite. I’ve requested for a full trial version and they seemed to be quite reluctant to provide me with a version that I can fully test on. I’d very much like to test and include Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Suite in the review, but unfortunately I do not have the funds to buy the full version. If they ever provide me with a full version, I will surely update this review.
Macrium, O&O and StorageCraft happily provided me with full version for testing without any delays. I managed to “find” the full version of Acronis, DriveClone, Paragon 9 and R-Drive so I didn’t have to contact them and can’t tell if their support is good or not.
All disk imaging software includes mount/unmount image, verify/validate image, scheduler for automatic creation of backup disk images, raw imaging (sector to sector), and support for Windows 7. So I will not include this 5 features to the comparison table below.
Features Comparison (Click to open image at new window)
Features Explanation:
1: Boot Menu = The imaging software adds the program to Windows start-up boot menu allowing you to run the software for backup/restore without booting in Windows or using the Rescue Disk.
2. Constant Backup = Able to automatically create non-stop backup every X minutes
3. Virtual Environment = Risk free environment for testing of new software or visiting websites with potentially dangerous content.
4. Restore to Different Hardware PC = In another words, it’s called Universal Restore. You can restore the backup image onto another computer without having the same hardware.
Disk Imaging and Restoration Speed (Click to open image at new window)
Here are some notes on the tests and rules of disk imaging:
- The disk imaging backup process is tested with default settings.
- Acronis Online Backup is not available for all countries yet. First 25GB cost $4.95 per month or $49.95 per year. Ever 5GB storage increment cost $0.79 per month or $9.49 per year.
- You can create a full image backup on the Windows where you’re logged on.
- You cannot perform full restoration on the Windows you are logged on. Restoration can only be done with Rescue Disk or Boot Menu where Windows on the hard drive is not loaded.
- Macrium has finally added the ability to create image backup using Rescue Disk but only for Windows PE v2.1.200 and above only. It’s a little buggy because the Rescue Disk backup compression doesn’t seems to compress as good as Macrium running in Windows and it also takes more time.
From the test that I’ve done, I can easily see that there is an obvious winner and that is Acronis TrueImage Home 2010! Acronis is able to backup and restore with very fast speed and also packed with a lot of features that cannot be found on other disk imaging software. Most importantly, the price is reasonable and doesn’t cost ridiculously expensive like its competitors. StorageCraft has the best backup and restore speed with a lot of features but it’s the most expensive.
Related posts:
Nice work man. Thanks for your great effort! Keep it up.
Raymond, None of these tools have the ability to quickly restore the system. Re-imaging costs at least 15-20 mintues of downtime. ISR apps like Rollback RX on the other hand allow one to restore with 2-3 minutes.
ISR is fast but not as reliable as disk imaging.
Imaging is slow but reliable.
The killer feature would be to combine full/incremental backups and instant system recovery into one app. The only application I’ve seen which does both is Farstone Total Backup Recovery Adavanced Workstation 7. From my tests, full backups are almost as fast as Shadow Protect and system restore happens in less that 2 minutes including power cycle. I think its an awesome tool because I have the power to muck around with the system and not worry about anything.
I dont know why people complain so much about Windows 7 backup .. i have been using it since it’s release and have no complaints..
Why do i like it?
I don’t have to install an additional 3rd party software to add more bloat to my setup.. 3rd party software always come with all kinds of useless crap!
Yea Windows 7 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but that’s how i like it.. it keeps the size down and does exactly what you need a backup software to do ..
I’m currently researching what product I wish to buy for my personal use. And, I’ve noticed some additional information.
I have heard of one important feature of ShadowProtect that you’ve failed to mention. (Note: My information may be dated, but comes from PC Magazine, so should be reasonably reliable.)
Changing a motherboard or video card, but keeping your old drive can leave you with a computer that won’t boot without a complete strip-down and re-installation of Windows. (I know this from personal experience.) According to PC Magazine, Storagecraft has found a way to deal with these hardware issues and incorporated it into ShadowProtect. And, apparently none of the others have such a feature. When the other products mention hardware independence, they are speaking of the disk drive and not the full system.
Thus, if you wish to upgrade your system hardware (especially the motherboard) without changing over your familiar drive setup, you may want to take an extra look at ShadowProtect.
Also, as I understand it, Paragon’s full Disk Manager Suite (more expensive) reportedly contains the most comprehensive set of tools currently out there … and the price has dropped dramatically. If you need addtional partitioning tools, you may want to look at that. Disk Manager Suite includes Drive Backup.
I saw Power Quest Drive Image 7 mentioned in the above comments. My work also used Drive Image and never had a problem with it. However, that product was purchased by Symantec a long time ago and became the basis of Norton Ghost 9.0. We switched to Acronis at the time, as we’d found a significant system performance penalty installing any Symantec product. We had little problem with Acronis, but the version we were using was not the easiest to use.
Why compare Shadowprotect 3.5?
Shadowprotect 4 has been released, amazingly better.
Raymond, can you compare the rest with this new protect?
Hi Raymond,
Thanks for the unbiased review on Disk Imaging software. There are many different programs to choose from but i prefer Acronis TrueImage.
I used to use PowerQuest DriveImage 7 (WinXP only!) and never had any issues. I have used Acronis TrueImage for a couple of years now. It is very easy to use and i have never had any problems or corrupted restore images. When using the bootable recovery CD, i always save my backup images to a 16GB USB flash stick and always set it to “validate the image file” if it passes then i burn them to a DVD-RW later when i have time and validate the burnt DVD just to make sure it’s ok, then i delete the file on my USB stick.
Regards,
Jon
Acronis is flaky and support is soooooooo bad.
Check out the forums.
Nice blog entry! I suggest you expand this in the future with some serious testing details. When evaluating some of these products, we quickly realized that incremental backup capability was a necessity for our business, because our servers became unacceptably unresponsive without incrementals. Differentials were not even acceptable. This narrowed the field quite a bit for us, to those few which support quick incremental backups. A home computer may not be seriously affected by such slowdowns, but businesses should keep this effect in mind – incrementals are the only decent option. There are other concerns too, with incrementals. Some products have serious problems with incrementals (read their support websites). We found in our tests only the StorageCraft ShadowProtect product was consistently reliable for incremental imaging. However we are using Server 2003, and even StorageCraft has had some issues with incrementals as they just released an update to fix some issues which are mainly seen on Vista and Server 2008 and Windows 7 and Server 2008R2. I would be very interested in hearing about the experiences of other users who are using StorageCraft ShadowProtect on Windows 7 and Server 2008R2. We will be migrating in the near future to these platforms and would like to know if the ShadowProtect incremental backups are working correctly on these platforms with their latest 3.5.1 release.
I use Eaz-Fix. It is simply amazing. It takes a snapshot of my c drive, which contains my Windows installation. D drive contains my data. It takes around 10-20 seconds to take a snapshot. It has now been 10 months since I did the baseline and I have about 30 programs that I have tested out during the last 10 months. So when I want to return to a clean machine, I reboot, hit the Home button, select the baseline and in the time it takes for me to reboot I have a brand new Windows. I then update my Windows and redo my baseline.
Get this. My colleage went to West Africa. He took his small Dell laptop along. He also uses Eaz-Fix. While there his hard disk was giving him serious problems. It crashed, or so to say, trashed Windows. He rebooted, went back to his last snapshot and was away again. He then set a new snapshot at the end of each day. Get this, this happened over 20 times before he returned to Dubai and was able to get a new hard drive. He couldn’t have made it through the African visit without Eaz-Fix.
Eaz-Fix can also burn an image of your hd and save it to external media in case your hd does come to its final resting place someday.
I wouldn’t waste my time with the above after using Eaz-Fix. Unless I am not understanding some of the bells and whistles above. True, if you need an online back up your system then something else would be better than Eaz-Fix.
Cheers.
Thanks Raymond. I’ve already tried 3 of the ones on your list. For the record, I always experience 2 to 3 Hard Disk failures annually. I bet these tools should be very helpful. :)
I have used Acronis very difficult to use & can be very unreliable if you don’t understand the program perfectly. Paragon is a very Good software & there are some free versions floating around the web. Shadow protectr desktop is totally reliable & has never failed . It acan be totally be run from the rescue. The one time I tried Drive Snapshot which by the way is expensive it did not work & hrew up some error codes. Terrabytes programs are probably to complicated for most people to handle.
Been using Acronis True Image for several years and I have nothing but compliments. One I like is the ability to do full backup (no shcheduled backups) by just using it’s rescue media
Nice article, thanks. I’ve been researching backup software for a few months now, and I would recommend reviewing Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery next time around. It’s my second choice behind Acronis.
EMC Retrospect (with the Disaster Recovery add-on) is another option I tested, but the recovery process is too flaky for serious use. The next version announced supposedly has a revamped PE-based recovery system, at which time it would be worth a second look (the Retrospect UI is very flexible.)
I have to agree with everyone wondering why Image For Windows didn’t make it? I know you can’t have ALL imaging programs in a test, but it for sure is strange to leave such a popular software out in favor of less known, less efficient ones?
I request you to try drive snapshot,since it is portable and just 225kb.
Thanks
Looks like you missed one of the best. Image for Windows at terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-windows.htm
Has any one tried Druvaa inSync. Its a nice product and works pretty well for Disk imaging.
druvaa.com/
There is, but needs a lot of time under real computing environment and not on just clean OS.
There is no option for testing reliablity?Acronis is most unreliable software raymond.
Have u tried drive snapshot,which is the most reliable and portable software.That makes the review quite unsatisfactory.
I’ve adopted since 3 years “Drive SnapShot” after trying Norton Ghost, Acronis Disk Image, Paragon Drive Backup….
The ease of use and the speed for backup and virtual drive are very good !
Incremental backup is working great !
Compression ratio is not the best but is a good compromise between space and speed…
I’m wondering if 4gb system memory would have made a big difference in all those timings/tests (i think yes).
Have you looked at Oops! Backup?
I am at IT Manager at a school and this is something that I have been struggling with for a while. Software I have is
1. Clonezilla
2. Acronis Echo Workstation
##Clonezilla##
Been using it quite a bit, just download ISO burn to DVD and the menus are easy to follow. I copy image of HDD to an external USB drive and if I have re image a computer, plug in my external drive and boot from the Clonezilla cd and do a restore. Typically for a computer with 10GB of data takes about 20 minutes.
The problems I have is that not all my computers have functional cd/dvd drives.
Clonezilla does not work well when working with hdds that are smaller in capacity to the drive you took the image from, eg, image from 60gb drive, and trying to restore to a 40GB drive even though only 10GB of data was on the image drive.
I have not been able to get clonezilla to boot from a usb drive .. tried everything I could think of, and no go.
Tried to get clonezilla to store image on a network shared drive using samba .. and didnt work. Very fustrating.
###Acronis ###
Clone and restore speeds are great. However, what I do is physically remove the drive which I want to restore the image to, connect it to one of myworkstations and do a restore.
30% of the time, have to reboot twice for the process to occur without errors.
—————-
What I would like to see is a review of cloning which can be done over the network.
All the solutions I currently use is fustrating!!
I really like the feature which Raymond mentioned in the article “Boot Menu” … could you please do a tutorial on how to get that going?
Thanks so much for your great blog.
Mr raymond,Paragon Drive Back up pro has an option to craete a boot menu.I don’t know if it works on windows 7 or not,i don’t use that OS.(it’s called back up capsule)
Anyway the important thing is reliability,i wish good luck to all those trying acronis after reading your review.
THey gonna need it :-))))
Thanks you so much. Im glad with this article is so nice no matter what they said
Unfortunatly i also second RandyN… Acronis for me NEVER AGAIN. Ray, let me tell you if you “found” Paragon, that when you “buy” it, you also have Virtual Environment plugin at your disposal, there’s 4 Recovery Environments, DOS, Linux (USB/CD), WinPE (available as ISO) and BartPE, you can have Boot Menu if you actually install Backup Capsule… what is this support for Windows Image of yours? because i can swap between Paragon’s and MS proprietary hot backup technology… LOL too many features to put them here.
@Bob
“Now, I think many people use back up imaging software wrongly.”
Please understand that there are people that image OTHER people hard drives, mostly for support, at whatever situation it is already in.
I´m really hoping DriveImage XML keeps up to date their portable version as well as adding incremental backups!
That´s a must have feature since it´s a pain and a waste of resources to create each time a whole disk image :S
On the other hand can I expect Macrium, Paragon, EASUS, etc release a portable version? since they are free versions of propietary software it doesn´t seems likely to happen.
Here’s my own review, from experience. As a Windows 7 64-bit user, I used every single one of these backups at one time or another and I can tell you, from experience, the two most reliable and fastest are Active@ Boot Disk and Macrium. I never had a problem backing up with them. I never had a problem restoring with them no matter how bad I screwed up my computer. Just use the WinPE rescue disk with Macrium, the Linux based one doesn’t work on Windows 7.
With all the others They either lack essential features or I’ve run into problems backing up or restoring.
Acronis has every feature imaginable including backing up an image to a VMWare virtual machine. However, sometimes when you want to restore using their Linux bases rescue disk, it won’t recognize the external hard drive I have my backups in. They say to use a WinPE disk but creating one is complicated and I could never manage to make one that works. So with Acronis, if my computer happens not to boot up, I’m screwed.
DriveClone is SLOW as a turtle and it also has drive recognition problems with their Linux based rescue disk.
Norton doesn’t support Windows 7 which is what I use. Stupid. Back in the day, I used the excellent Norton Ghost 2003, the grandaddy of them all.
O&O is actually very stable, has backup and restore speeds, and its rescue disk works well. but it doesn’t have the feature to backup individual files.
Paragon is like Acronis. Loaded with features. Terrific. But the backup is as SLOW as a turtle. Takes forever. In fact, its the slowest backup I ever used. Differential backups get as big as the full backups and take longer. What’s the sense of having a differential backup then? Might as well do a full all the time.
R-Drive is missing essential features, incremental/differential, and file backup.
Windows backup is missing essential features, incremental/differential, and file backup. If you happen to restore a such a system files backup after you install software, that software will be broken. Only good thing is you can use your Windows installation disk as a rescue disk. Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for having such a limited backup on their excellent Windows 7.
StorageCraft. Well respected with an excellent reputation. Very stable and reliable with many features. Reliable rescue disk. The backup software most used in companies by system administrators. Raymond made a mistake in his chart. Storage Craft (ShadowProtect) does have “Constant Backup”. In fact, it is completely “Constant Backup”based. Unfortunately there is no option to schedule backups manually, which is why I don’t use it. If it did, this would be my backup software for sure. I don’t like having automatic constant backups done in the background, it takes up a lot of space plus you’d be backing up stuff you screwed up, and viruses and trojans and what not.
That’s it. I hope this helps people in choosing a backup software.
Very good review Ray ;)
Thanks a buch!!!
I’ve been using Acronis over a year right now and I haven’t yet encountered any problem on restoring files thru this software. I believe Ray has a point there…It’s not in the software, It’s on the user. Great post Ray!
As usual a good review raymond
Just to say that a i stopped using dos ghost 8.x and 11.x as they do not work with lastest ich hardware
Even Acronis 2010 linux boot disk was not able to read disk :( It works under windows to create backaup, but rescue disk was unable to restore on the same hardware…
Concerning acronis that have my favor from some years, anybody can use the freely oem release of Acronis True Image (olde release 11) branded for Seagate / Maxtor disk that can be downloaded from seagate place. it works if you have at least one Seagate or Maxtor disk (internal or external)
elarifr
RandyN, I agree with you. Acronis is not reliable and the support is truly appalling. I find StorageCraft rock solid but can’t justify the price to clients. I am going to try Paragon.
FYI, Seagate DiscWizard is free and uses some licensed version of Acronis but it only works on Seagate hard drives. “Powered by Acronis” is the on the first page of the documentation.
seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf
I’ve tried all those and a few more. The best I found was Image for Windows by TeraByte Unlimited.
What I found more interesting while researching products was the fake review (top 10 review) sites that gave inaccurate and misleading information on almost all the products. They must get paid somehow.
Hie ray ur check is awesome u have lot patience to write it over here … dat was g8 nd i Loved itt
Check this software: I really like it and is too easy / occupies less storage space / extremely fast (without compressing image file )
It creates a XML image file and allows browsing through image file as well as extracting stuffs from image file! However if u need to restore the image file to C: drive you need to use Bart PE!! ( I am pretty sure u know about this )
DRIVE IMAGE XML
runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
Here it is in a nutshell:
For the best paid back up software, go with Acronis True Image.
I have used Acronis for several years and can’t be more than happy with it. It is true that in previous versions, image corruption was a problem, but that issue has since been fixed.
For the best free back up software, go with Paragon. Paragon is very similiar to Acronis, although a tad bit slower. But hell, its free.
Now, I think many people use back up imaging software wrongly. What you are supposed to do ideally is to reinstall your os, make the necessary updates, install all the programs you use, then make a backup of that hard drive (in its pristine state). If you do this (and you only need to do it 1 time), the time it takes to back up is really fast and the time it takes to restore is faster to. Everyone should be making back up copies of their data and placing it on a cd or dvd. Such data should NOT be part of the incremental back up image or the disk image itself.
That’s true RandyN. Unfortunately a person must use a product long enough to know the reliability of a program. Other than that, the tester must be very sure that any problems he/she encounter is not caused by computer/user problem.
I’ve been a computer tech for many years and a lot of times when a software doesn’t work, it’s not the software’s fault but rather the user problem or the computer just have too many things going on (multiple antivirus, registry tweakers, and etc)
So far I had no problems creating and restoring images using all 10 software listed in this test.
Sorry but you completely missed the most important point about imaging or backup and recovery software. While speed is important, it takes a back seat to reliability. No matter how fast a product is, it doesn’t make a difference if you can’t count on it to work every time.
I used to run Acronis for a couple versions but got fed up with creating an image and then later going back to restore that image only to find out it was now corrupted/invalid, etc. Another problem I had with Acronis is when you move image to external drives they get corrupted frequently.
On top of these problems, Acronis technical support and customer service is horrible. In short, I wouldn’t use Acronis even if it were free.
I switched to Paragon Drive Backup and have never had any issues. ShadowProtect is also a good product and either of these is significantly better than Acronis (regardless of speed).
You missed the best ones raymond
1)Drive snapshot —>the fastest
2)Image for Windows.
These are the best.
Since Ghost DOS that you boot the diskette or CD I am still looking for alternative. I don’t want Shadow Copy, I want to boot from CD or USB.
I tried Clonezilla but it is bad design and very hard to use for quick disk to image or disk to disk.
What is the program I should get?
For me, the best is Macrium Free Edition. It’s fast, free and it’s not invasive as acronis that put many many files on memory at pc start. Macrium put only one file in memory for mount images as hdd that you can disable). I like a program that only backup without utility in memory. Macrium need only a add on for me “file exclusion”. After many years that I use acronis I say to it bye bye. I hate hungry not useful feature software.
Very informative and useful article. Thank you.
wow, very useful Ray. i’ve added to my reading list.
Hi Raymond,
Thanks for the comparison. I have been using Acronis for several years and never failed me. It is a great software though I am not using the latest version.
Hi Raymond,
Thanks for the comparison. I have been using Acronis for several years and nevel failed me once. It is a great software though I am not using the latest version.
Hey Raymond,
Great I am trying to decide on what software to install in Windows 7 and disc imaging is important. Ram Agarwal sujestion about adding is year is a good one. Most times when I am researching software I will search your site but you go back some years and I want the most current software and it is almost impossible to find out what year the post was.
Been using Acronis since several years and always great results. Since day 1 of knowing Acronis, Ghost was kicked out and never looked back.
Good review.
Hi Reymond,
why you don’t put ‘year’ too in your articles with month & date?
Thanks a lot Reymond for such a nice article. I highly appreciate for your efforts, time. Its true “Computers, made easy with Reymond.cc” :)
I really appreciate your effort! Customer service/support is high on my list and Active@ Disk Image is off my list permanently because they couldn’t provide even a simple response. I just bought an external hard disk drive to either backup or image my two hard drives. Your research is very helpful. Thanks for spending the time to test and post results in a table for easy comparison!
Hi Raymond,
Did you try differential backup speed : here several products behave very differently. For instance ShadowProtect takes as much time as a full backup, like O&O DiskImage. Macrium Reflect really shines on this and make diff backup a great speed. For instance, my 35 GB Vista Home partition is saved by SP in 20 min in full & diff mode, with Macrium : 18min for full and 4 min for diff.
Also, I noticed you left Drive Snapshot and Image for Windows/Linux aside. I would recommend you also add, if possible to this excellent overview
Regards !
Great job raymond.. Always loved by ur ‘testing’ article.. :)
Lee, every disk imaging software is different. For example, some program has 3 levels of compression and some has 5. How can anyone know which setting is to be compared with which ones? Moreover I do not have the time to test every single compression level.
In terms of speed and features for disk imaging software, I strongly believe that freeware cannot be better than shareware.
Although I know CloneZilla is fast and also packed with very advanced features, but I don’t think any computer user is able to use it because it’s not as user friendly as the shareware.
Comparing disk imaging tool between shareware and freeware is just not fair.
I second with Simon.
I’ve heard many great things about Acronis, but I’ve been using DriveImage XML for my personal back ups.
Since you seemed to be using mostly the default settings as well and not really comparing a program’s features over others, I’d also like to see a comparison between the freeware and shareware.
Simon, this review is fair and I am not biased in favor of Acronis.
Restoring a backed up image to another computer with a different hardware requires more work to be done rather than fixing a “broken MBR”.
The free ones has already been done by DotTech.
dottech.org/headline/11628
It’s truly unbelievable that you didn’t test “Image for DOS” (terabyteunlimited.com). If you ever tried this software you never ever want any other software again. Believe me!
Hi,
Good posting however your requirement for a “Universal Restore” may have biased the results in favour of Acronis.
Windows does have utilities to fix broken MBR’s ect and this should be reflected in the tables.
How about a similar review of the free packages such as DriveImage XML?
It would be interesting to see how the free offerings stack up against the pay products.
Kind Regards
Simon
I love this article. Very impressive and many details. Thank you very much.
Thanks for the test, but I cannot read the diagrams. It says: Click to open image at new window, but that does not work.
Good Post :))
Very good article. I’ve been waiting for this sort of testing for some time and now I’m glad I found it on your blog. Usually I’ve tried to make backup only with Ghost, Paragon, Acronis and now with Windows 7, and trully, Acronis is a very good choise. Paragon for me was little slow, but with a good control of the backup; Ghost it was fast and it worked on slower computer and Windows 7, without compression, I don’t think is usefull when you make backup on dvds.