Hard Drive Disasters: Why I Love (And Hate) Acronis True Image
The hard drive on my mother's PC was a goner. It just wouldn't boot. I had a backup, so I thought I was home free. But I was wrong. You can read the beginning of this story in yesterday's blog.
The problem was that the drive I had used to back up my mom's system had one or more bad sectors. Incredibly, Acronis True Image didn't warn me that the medium wasn't in good condition.
Acronis screamed bloody murder when I tried restoring the image to the fresh drive on my mother's new PC, announcing that the image was corrupt.
Validating the integrity of a backup is essential, as I've learned (and I hope you take seriously).
What ticks me off is that Acronis actually has the ability to validate the integrity of the backup -- but it doesn't do it automatically; you've got to set this critical option manually. How absurd.
Worse, as you go through the Acronis wizard, you eventually face the "Choose Backup Options" screen; click "Set the options manually" and you're looking at a lengthy list. The validation option is clear at the bottom, and you have to expand the category to see it.
Most people skip this step
Dig deeper and you find the Validation option
Another Acronis Problem
There's another issue. Acronis's Validation option is time consuming. I figure that validating a full backup -- about 214GB -- will take a while, and I'm fine with that. Yet it takes just as long to validate a 60MB incremental backup. That's because Acronis is dumb as nails and insists on validating the entire full backup as well as all the incrementals. It takes too long and discourages users -- including me -- from doing the validation.
An Acronis representative said that he's told the head of product development about my two gripes and fixes would appear in the next release. Great, but I still don't have warm feelings towards TrueImage right now.
I'm still using Acronis True Image. But I'm darn sure looking at the other backup programs -- and I'm ready for your recommendations.
Backup Tips from a Network Guru
My network friend and guru, George Siegel, says, "I’m really paranoid about this stuff. I backup multiple disk images to protected areas of the hard drive as well as to an external drive. I also back up data to multiple locations using a straight copy utility such as Robocopy. Most of the time, it’s overkill. But it’s saved my butt more than once."
Don't Wait for a Drive Failure
If your drive's still up and running, I have a few things you can do to prepare yourself -- and your drive -- for that fateful day when it hits a brick wall.
First, start by printing and saving a handful of helpful how-to pieces from back issues of PC World. One that I like is Kirk Steers's ancient, but still useful article, Hardware Tips: Take a Crash Course in Emergency PC Recovery.
That not enough? Try First Aid for Your Hard Drive or my colleague Lincoln's Spector's, Diagnose and Repair an Unbootable XP or Vista PC.
I've got to go: I'm about to do a backup -- and a validation!
Talkback
Have something to say about backup software? You can use Comments below or if you'd prefer, fire an e-mail right into my inbox.
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I'm surprised that you of all people would't validate your backups. I always do that because it's worthless to have a backup if it got screwed up somewhere.
Tip: try restoring the "corrupt" image anyway. Acronis often gives false corruption warnings, is my experience.
Apparently this has something to do with the allotted time span within which certain information has to be processed by Acronis: if something lasts too long, this generates a false warning.
Greetz, Pjotr.
Hey Steve,
I'll be foward about the two problems you're facing.
1. I know a couple of backup products that validate automatically, like for example DriveClone Pro (http://www.farstone.com/software/driveclone-pro.htm)
2. Using DriveClone, I believe it takes about 10 minutes to validate a 214GB full backup.
I just downloaded the trial and played with it for a while. I found it to be really really easy and fast. Easy as in they include pretty much all the important features and most operates automatically.
Fast as in they have a really cool feature Acronis doesn't offer - Snapshot. It literally takes "snapshot" of your entire system and when system failures or virus occurs, you can just click to a previous snapshot taken and it's as if nothing had happened: literally "undo" virus. I tested it and it took me literally 55 seconds to recover my entire system.
also driveclone's got built-in universal restore. saves me a lot of money. thank goodness.