Acronis True Image

I'm setting up my new quadcore today as my Sonar 8PE DAW. I bought Acronis True Image and I am going to install this to protect the system while I upgrade to Vista SP1 etc. Has anyone used this here? There is a try and decide mode which indicates I can test programme and system settings before committing. Would this be suitable for Vista type system upgrades?

Reason for looking for other peoples experiences is last time I did this the Vista SP1 install completely trashed my system, I couldn't go back to the recovery partition, safe mode or anything, and had to rebuild the system from scratch. I need to make sure I get full protection this time round - Any info anyone?

Garry Kiosk

I use True Image on XP and Vista. Excellent program and far better than Norton Ghost which I also used for several years although only on 98 and XP. Never used the try and decide part though, I tend to just reinstall my system from a backup if I install something that seems to be causing problems. Probably should make the effort to use it and maybe save myself some time.

Hi Garry,

True Image works great for creating/restoring backup image files.
The only caveat (right now) is that True Image has problems with the x58 chipset.
I'm sure Acronis will get this sorted...

ORIGINAL: wormser

Hi Gary!

I agree with the others that TrueImage is an excellent program.
However, like most back up programs, it is imperative that you actually TEST it.
Don't rely on checking the archive for integrity.
Wipe a drive and actually try and restore using the recovery CD and your archive.

I fully agree with wormser. MAKE SURE your drive images actually work, especially if you have put them on DVDs and even more if you've spanned the images across multiple DVDs. I've had a couple of occasions where I needed to restore from DVDs and have gotten the message "file corrupted, can not continue restore". These files were checked with the True Image image checker yet they still would not restore. Not good.

That said, I've never had a problem with images that were stored on an internal hard drive. They restore just fine and work as advertised. Just be careful with removable media and True Image.

Disclaimer: This happened to me on both True Image 8 and 9. I have not tried any newer versions of the program so I can't say if this is still a problem.

Best regards,
Bill

I've used True Image many times to replace the system drive by simply restoring the backup image file to the new drive. Somebody on this forum mentioned a VST plug or instrument that required reactivation after doing that, as though the product checked the hard drive serial number. I have never run into that.

So one way you can test your image is to physically disconnect your system drive and restore to a different drive, and then verify that everything works.

True Image does wipe out the entire partition before restoring, but it does not attempt to put all the sectors in the same location they came from. That behavior would cause problems when restoring to different drives. The sectors that are marked as bad on the new drive will not be used. Also, you can change the partition size and even the file system (FAT32, NTFS) when restoring to the new drive.

Just to top and tail this thread a couple of weeks after starting it - I have gone from newbie to old lag with True Image in s couple of weeks. When staging a DAW, I would recommend the try and decide mode 100% every time as there are so many add-on, VST's upgrades etc it gives total peace of mind - A great piece of software.

Kiosk