I've read a lot about the virtues of Acronis on this newsgroup.
However, people continually talk about IMAGING as a backup. I don't
want to do that.
Can Acronis use a completely different size hard drive to simply
backup selected files/directories (not a cluster by cluster clone)?
Acronis is a company, not a software product. If you are asking about
their True Image product then you also need to specify WHICH version
you are considering. Their Home version sucks:
- Does not save *physical* images (sector-by-sector) to allow
restoring a partition/disk back to the EXACT state as before. It only
saves logical images; i.e., it has to open and read files through the
file system. A logical image may get an OS partition back up and
running okay. It won't be exactly in the same state as before. There
is no option to force True Image Home to do a physical image. It will
only do a physical image if it does not recognize the file system or
the file system is corrupt.
- Unlike DriveImage used to be (before Symantec grabbed it) that could
save a physical image by rebooting the system and running the image
program outside the OS (so the volume was static), TrueImage Home runs
under a currently running OS. It saves a *logical* image while the OS
is running (and while files are open and being changed). Rebooting to
use their rescue CD to run TI Home (without Windows running) is the
closest I can get it to do something like a physical image backup.
However, and if using rewritable CD/DVD discs to save the image, make
damn sure you have enough of them already wiped (formatted) before
starting as TI Home can write to rewritable CD/DVD media but it won't
format it. If you have 10 DVD-RW already formatted and ready for the
backup but it takes 11 of them then you are screwed by having to abort
the almost finished backup, reboot into Windows, and reformat the 11
discs needed (and probably several more just in case).
- I and other users have encountered file read errors. The file on
which the error occurs will change in every backup. This means, at a
minimum, that you will lose that file. It could also mean you lose
the entire rest of the backup. When the error occurs, a window pops
up announcing the file read error which hangs the backup. You come
back the next morning to find the backup got hung. You need to use
your computer so you have to kill off the backup (see below on why due
to poor data bus bandwidth control). You've lost the backup because
they halted it to show a file read error instead of skipping past to
continue the rest of the backup and then show the error in a log. One
suggestion to reduce (but not eliminate) file read errors is to run
the backup job at low priority. That means, for example, that a
backup that might've completed in 2 hours will now take 15, or more
hours. Of course, you'll still have to be there to close the file
read dialog windows so the backup will actually continue and
eventually complete.
- The Home version does not support volume shadow copying to
reliability save a snapshot of open files. Besides the above file
read errors, it also leads to out-of-sync files that were open at the
time they got backed up. VSS has been available in Windows XP and
Windows 2003 from their beginning and supported by the crippled NT
Backup utility included in them. Acronis hasn't managed to figure out
VSS should be supported in the Home version. They suggest you pay
more for the Workstation version. They say VSS will be supported in
some future version of TI Home (but Windows XP has been out for years
and Acronis still doesn't include it in the Home version).
- You can specify a priority for a backup job. That does NOT affect
the task priority for the processes ran for the backup. The processes
still run at Normal priority. Priority in TI Home is a crude and
poorly designed control for regulating the data bus bandwith. At low
backup priority, your host is barely usable. You will get infuriated
at the halted and jerky response of your host, and the backup will
take like 15 hours to complete so your computer is farked the whole
time. At normal backup priority, you will have long periods of
waiting for your host to respond. Obviously a faster computer would
help but you probably don't want to be doing much when the backup
runs. At high backup priority, forget using your computer for
anything else.
- They tried to include quotas in pre-defined backup locations. You
define a backup location (i.e., drive and path) where TI Home then
will take care of renaming the backup files so they don't overwrite
each other (there is no option to keep backups from overwriting if
they specify the same base filename). That's nice but the quotas are
supposed to protect out-of-disk problems. Supposedly you can set the
max disk space used for backup files in the backup location, how many
maximum backup files to keep there, and how long before they expire.
The quotas are not honored. I was told this was a new feature. It
doesn't work yet.
- The renaming of backup files in the backup location is handy. When
defining a backup policy, you can specify "Create a full backup after
N backups". That way, you could define an incremental or differential
backup so the first one would be a full backup, then N more
incremental or differental backups are saved, and the cycle repeats.
It helps in not having to define multiple policies that will manage
the backup files properly. However, this option is not honored if any
of the quotas are enabled in the backup location. Since the quotas
are not honored anyway, there is no point in using them. Define the
backup location, turn off all its quotas, and use the "Create a full
backup after N backups" option to keep the total count and size of
backups under your disk's free space.
- If quotas are enabled on the backup location, TI Home doesn't merely
delete the full backup (and its incremental or differentials tied to
that full backup) when disk space needs to be freed up. Instead they
consolidate the incrementals so there are less of them to store with
the associated full backup. This safety measure is trying to keep as
much of the old backups as possible but it incurs a big hit in time.
Consolidation can take many hours, so your 2-hour backup could end up
taking 8 hours, or more. It's a bit tough to setup schedules of tasks
in their scheduler and also in Windows' own task scheduler when it is
unknown how long maximum the task should take.
- They have a Secure Zone to hide backup files under the mistaken
premise that hidden partitions are safe from malware. Nope, malware
does not require using a drive letter to access a partition that is
recognized by the OS. However, it has value in keeping them out of
sight from you or other users to prevent accidental deletion. Handy
and not handy. Not handy in that you cannot access the backups in the
Secure Zone even through True Image itself. Say you find out that you
are infected or included the wrong partitions in a backup. The latter
can happen if you change the number of partitions on a disk because TI
Home first selects all drives on a disk rather than what you specify
(i.e., if you have 1 partition and select it, TI Home selects the the
whole disk so adding a partition later will also include it). You now
have backups in the Secure Zone that you don't want. You don't want
the infected backup there because you might restore from it and get
reinfected again. If a 2nd partition got created after defining the
backup policy but which you did not want to include (i.e., you put
files there that you don't want TI Home to backup from that disk) and
which made for a huge backup, you can't delete it (and update the
backup policy to reflect just the original partition to redo the
backup). The Secure Zone is hidden from normal access but it
shouldn't be hidden when using TI Home itself. You can mount the
backup image but that doesn't let you delete it. If you mount in
write mode, it says another backup gets saved with the changes (so you
still don't end up deleting the unwanted backup should you, say, mount
that backup image and delete all files and instead you still have the
unwanted backup and now another one with zero files in it).
I gave up trying to use TI Home for logical file backups. I don't
like logical image backups, especially when the OS is running. So I
only use the bootable [rescue] CD to start TI Home (and not within the
OS) to save a logical image (although I'd prefer a physical image).
For logical file backups, I went to PC Backup from Migo Software (was
Stompsoft) which is a rebadged version of Novastor's NovaBackup. It
supports VSS, never has had an file read errors, causes some impact on
responsiveness of the host but is still a very usable host. However,
as with many backup programs, you will need to manage the backup files
to eliminate the old ones so you don't run out of disk space.
NovaBackup has an overwrite option for backup so you can start a set
of backups from scratch, like having an incremental w/overwrite run on
Tuesday (to start them all over), incrementals w/append on Wed to Sun
(so they append to the same backup file), and a full w/overwrite on
Mon (or you could have an incremental w/overwrite specifying a
different file for each day). With the append option (and overwrite
if not specified), you can figure out when you want to restart the
backups. TI Home tried to do something the same with their quotas on
the backup location but they don't work.
There was only a couple reasons why I quit using crippled NT Backup
included in Windows XP: (1) It won't compress the backup file when
saving it to a hard disk (it can only turn on *hardware* compression
is supported by the backup device, like a tape drive that has its own
hardware compression option), so backups are much larger when using
this backup program; and, (2) It doesn't support spanning the backup
across multiple CD/DVD media (but will support spanning across tapes).
NT Backup was a crippled version of Backup Exec Desktop from Veritas
who sold it off to Stompsoft (which, I think went to Ahead as Nero
Backup while Stompsoft, now Migo Software, switched to Novastor's
NovaBackup).
So I dumped TI Home for doing logical file backups and went with PC
Backup (aka NovaBackup). I still have TI Home to do *logical* image
backups but am now checking the alternatives to see which ones do
physical image backups (like DriveImage did although it still could
skip unused sectors by reading the file system).
