Kurt N. wrote on Jun 24^th, 2007 at 2:56pm:

I agree about the $200 ($40/seat x 5).

I've seen many posts here (and elsewhere) where someone wants to take his cloned backup and restore it to any computer out there and it will work.  I haven't found that "magic bullet" yet.  Only in DOS days could you take your hard drive out and put it in another computer and expect it to work.  It didn't work very well trying that with Windows 3.1, 95, 98, etc and definitely didn't work with Windows 2000 Pro.

Image backup programs such as Ghost (and others) were and are a great backup scheme, allowing one to easily recovery from a hard drive mechanical or electrical failure (or software disaster), without re-installing your operating system.  That is the beauty of the product and its primary benefit, in my opinion.

I don't think anyone can expect to take a functioning hard drive out of one pc (e.g. Dell) and insert it in any other pc (brand x) and expect it to work.

Besides the software issues, there are the licensing issues because unfortunately Dell (and others) prohibit you from even replacing your failed motherboard on your Dell pc with a different one.  Your XP license is tied to that motherboard, period.  Shocking but true.

Quote:
 
Yes, I completely agree.  Don't misunderstand me.  I would love to be able to take my hard drive out of my pc and put it into another pc and have it work.  That's the first step, and then backup/imaging will follow.  

I just haven't seen that XP or Vista can do that yet.  Maybe Microsoft will come up with a way to make their operating systems portable.  I hope so.  That's the issue.

P.S. I just searched the Acronis forum for the word "corrupt" and got 40 pages of hits.  At 29 listings/page, that would be about 1136 posts on the issue.  By actual users.

I'm not making any judgements on how many of those posts are valid, just pointing out the popularity of the topic.  Usually the corruption problem arises from memory issues.  I personally think it is somehow related to the shadowing-method that Acronis uses in their backup process.  Memory is used to hold pending disk-writes, so the backup integrity is very memory intensive and any memory error or aberration can cause corruption.  Technically you can call all of those "user errors", yet the problem exists.

Symantec uses a different method which doesn't seem to be sensitive to memory timing or loading like Acronis.  With Ghost, if you have a verified backup, it really is verified.  From what I read (and I follow the Acronis forum regularly) you can't say that about True Image.

I had no idea all this copying and cloning was so complicated!  I'm running WinXP on a SATA IDE as my C drive.  I have bought another drive exactly the same and I want to clone my C drive to the new drive so that if my C drive ever dies I can just replace it with the clone.   Will Ghost 12 allow me to do this?

I tried a software package called AIS which appeared to copy the C drive to the new drive but when I tried to boot from it I was told I had to copy the boot sector - but of course it didn't tell me what it was called and where to find it!

So can I use Ghost 12 to clone my C drive to the same model and size drive and if the need arises, boot from the new drive?

Thanks in advance,

Userisme

Kurt N.,

Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery has a Restore Anyware component. I haven't tested it. The software is $10 to $20 more than Ghost 12.

http://www.symantec.com/smb/products/overview.jsp?pcid=bu_rec&pvid=lsrdt30

Brian,

Thanks for finding this one.  I'll take a look at it....