Acronis... 2015? 2014?

I've been shopping for Acronis and reading a mixed bag of reviews for 2015. Is 2015 as good as 2014? I am guessing that people having problems with Acronis 2015 are actually having hardware problems like some do trying to run new Sonaar on XP or an older machine. IDK.
My needs are to clone two 2TB drives and one 500GB drive. I'm not certain about the cloning drive, will I be just as well with a 4TB drive and partitions or should I get duplicate size drives of the ones I am cloning?
Will ATI partition a larger drive for me or do I use Windows to do that?
The computer is running Windows 8.1
 
I'm buying a USB 3.0 drive dock and a SATA drive or drives.
 
Would you advise one large drive with partitions for drive clones or three drives the same size as the ones I am cloning?
 
I've probably asked this and had it answered but these days my "forgetter" seems to work better than my "rememberer".
Thank you,
Julien
 
 

I used to use Acronis and recommended it to the PC clients I support.  However, I had two occasions to backup that Acronis failed.  There are similar reports about Acronis on the Windows 7 forum.  Acronis didn't get a third chance, I have dumped Acronis and now use Macrium Reflect (paid version). 
 
An application difference.  With Acronis, creating a WinPE bootable rescue disc was mostly a manual procedure.  With Macrium Reflect it is automated and the Macrium application to create the WinPE bootable disc is a breeze.   That was another problem that may not have been Acronis' fault but I tried to do a restore using the Linux version rescue disc and Acronis couldn't find the drive I wanted to restore to, but the WinPE version did.
 

Last day of sale.

I've used Acronis since probably 2008 or earlier. Some releases were troublesome, but fixes eventually appeared.
I find ATI 2015 to be a big improvement and simplification. The PE boot creation is now completely automated, like Macrium. I recommend either tool, but I prefer Acronis because I know it better.
 
I also use Retrospect for incremental file backup (nightly), but use Acronis for monthly images (or more frequent) especially before Patch Tuesdays.
 
I keep the system C drive minimal and backups with verification take about 20 minutes. Restores are a lot quicker then debugging, so I never hesitate to restore when I encounter some sort of software installation or other problem.
I have yet to find an image restoration problem.
 
I use YUMI 
 
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
 
to make FAT32 boot USB drives with ATI WinPE 2015, Acronis Disk Director WinPE 12, a Linux Mint distro, Hiren's Boot CD, and Kaspersky AV disk images and a few other such tools. You can fit a lot of boot ISOs on even a small Flash drive and they boot quite a bit faster than DVDs. You just have to boot in Legacy mode (if you have a UEFI secure boot BIOS) and make sure the boot prom supports USB. I think all modern BIOS products made in the last few years will do that.
 
Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to make bootable NTFS flash drives or multi-partition flash drives. I prefer NTFS because I like to have encrypted folders on these portable devices for saving passwords, etc. Without the NTFS EFS support I have to use encrypted archives for such stuff.
 
A flash drive is modelled after the floppy paradigm - a removable media. So it does not support multiple partitions. Apparently there is no way to eject multiple partitions at once in Windows. Or maybe there are other reasons for that lack of functionality.
 
There was a protocol called U3 developed at Sandisk for some stuff like that, but it was problematic and is no longer supported.
 
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3
 
 
 

From what I gather, if you "clone" a drive and it has several partitions, when you clone the "C" drive that is all you get is the "C" drive partition and nothing else.  If you "backup" (Image as Macrium calls it) the entire drive - all partitions - then you have a complete "copy" of the drive.  If the main drive would fail for whatever reason you can "restore" the entire drive using the backed up image.
 
I may be wrong (been wrong before once - LOL) but what I see as how clone works.

jbow
When you guys are saying "backup" are you talking about a drive clone? I want to have it so that I can just get a new drive if one dies and have everything ready to install on it and be as if it never failed... and I NEED easy. I am a computer user not a builder or programmer in any form or manner, I need a button to click that does everything I need without asking me questions I don't know the answer to... if that exists.
Thanks... I will probably go with Acronis 2015 and if there is anything that I don't completely understand I will ask someone.
 
What about drives? Would it be easier for me to buy one 3G SATA drive or three SATA drives that are the same size and the ones I am cloning/backing up?
 
Thanks again!
J

 
A true drive clone is an exact copy of a drive down to the volume serial numbers. You don't want to have two of these installed at the same time as Windows won't be able to tell them apart very easily (other than drive letter which is not much used internally). Especially you don't want to clone your system drive and reboot with old and new installed.
 
An image of a drive is a file, much like a zip archive, of drive data. It could be all the data, or some part of the data, like an incremental backup, or a backup of the documents and settings. You need the program software to interpret or make use of an image, it isn't directly usable by windows, usually.
 
As for numbers of drives, I would recommend a 4TB drive not the 3TB drives (I assume you mean 3TB not 3G). 3TB drives, at least those by Seagate, had some reliability issues. The 4TB seem much better.
 
But there could be advantages to having fewer smaller drives. For example, you could have a 3-stage backup process with three drives - one is current, the next is the previous backup, the next even older, and you always rotate these. This gives you physical redundancy and perhaps is more secure. With a single drive you mix them all up and have to sort by date to find what you want. No big deal either way. Probably 1 big drive is cheaper than several smaller drives of the same total size.
 
If you clone a drive, you can just swap out failures with a clone. 

 
If you image a drive, you have to restore the image onto another drive (or the old one if it still works).
 
The clone is quicker, but you can only have one clone on a drive, while you can probably fit many images from various times on a single big image drive.
 
Lastly, if you keep your system partition fairly small, so the C drive just has the OS and installed programs - and your user settings, documents, sound stuff, etc., are elsewhere. Then an image backup of the system is fairly small and quick.
 
I have a lot of software installed, but the C drive backup is just over 60GB in size. This takes about 10 or 15 minutes to backup and validate and just as quickly may be restored. So I can more easily restore a faulty system than try to debug some new problem.
 
However, when you separate things, you have to be wary about problems caused when the program defaults are not handled well (for example, the Rapture Pro multisample content and program paths are hard-coded or something like that.)
 
And, if you back up these small system images often, you don't need system restore points. Turning them off will give you a lot of free space, perhaps many GB of data, depending on your settings. Removing system restore points will speed things up a little and improve file defragmentation, but it is a subtle thing.
 
The more you get into this, the more you need to be aware of.
 
Since you want the simplest thing - the drive clone procedure is perhaps the easiest for you. But if you have a single drive with lots of samples and stuff one it, it could take several hours to clone. So you won't be doing that very often. Small system images can be done very frequently, on the other hand, and you can have them going back in time for many months. They all still fit on the single backup drive.
 
 
 
 

I always keep a recent full back up (backed up by Acronis) off premise. I have a couple back ups in rotation on premise, but I regularly keep at least one off premise.

Overall, I've restored from Acronis maybe 8 times or more over the last 3-4 years. Always due to something weird that entered into the system. Unless you're an IT helpdesk pro, it's far easier to roll back than to troubleshoot something that has hidden itself somewhere. Acronis restore (which is easy) has saved my bacon plenty of times. I can't imagine the bummer it would have been without those backups.

...wicked
I did have a backup image fail from too much compression a couple of years ago...which is the other big potential problem with doing backups like this. If it fails...you're hosed. 

If you only have one back up on one back up drive and there's something wrong, yes, you could be hosed. But if you have rotational back ups on different drives even if one can't restore because of some issue, the other back ups will come through. It's like winning a bad lottery if your back up restore doesn't work (meaning that won't generally be your luck), but chance of that happening twice are astronomically low.

I have had in my many restores from Acronis two restores that didn't work. Something wrong in the file. Both times from the same back up drive. I learned to not use that drive. However, since I have/had multiple back ups (rotating a week apart on different drives) I was able to restore without issue. I think I had a bad sector on my back up drive that didn't behave right. That's why I heartily recommend multiple back up drives. You never know.

jbow
I will just get Acronis 2015 but I'm still a little confused by some of the replies. I really don't know much about this and I hope it is easy. I have three drives in my DAW. The OS and programs drive is 500G. I have two 1TB drives, one for samples, one for projects.
What I want is to (I think) get three SATA drives, an USB3 docking station, and keep up to date full backups or images so that if a HD fails I can install a new one and use the backup drive and the docking station to make the new internal drive as if it is the old one and never failed.
I'm not interested in looking for folders or anything, I just want to restore what I had if something goes wrong. An offsite backup, along with the backup drives, sounds like a good idea too. I can probably piggyback off my wife's office backup, or just use whatever Acronis offers, IDK.
I just need easy and complete. I have more than enough problems and things that I don't understand but try to use already.
I'm probably over thinking this. I was referring to a 4G drive as a possible partitioned drive for all three of my drives, that I want backed up or imaged but I'm thinking now that just getting three identical (but green, cheaper) drives will be a little more simple... but not having done this before, I am not sure. I have done basic default backups always and backed up projects in other ways, anyway. I'll order something next week. Acronis 2015, three SATA drives, and a USB3 dock station.
 
Thanks for the help.
 
One thing that I am uncertain about. If I do a "drive image" can I update it or does the whole drive have to be re-imaged over every time? I guess I could do an image on the OS/Programs drive and just keep an updated backup of the samples and projects drives, but I'd surely want to keep the OS/Programs drive "image" updated. Is there anything complicated or time consuming in this idea that I am not aware of? I guess simply.. if I make a "drive image" of the C drive, a clone of the whole drive, OS and everything.. can I easily keep it updated or will I encounter a problem that I am not aware of? I don't know what to ask or how to ask it because I am pretty much ignorant about cloning drives.
 
Thanks again for all the time and help...Julien

 You really don't need drive image software for this. Select all files and copy to external drive.  The OS is the only one you really need software. You can also use the one in Windows.