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.

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 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.

Raymond, can you compare the rest with this new protect?

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

http://forum.acronis.com/forums/acronis-discussion-forums/acronis-true-image-forum