USB Based Drive Imaging

hucker

Active Member
I have a friend who asked about backing up their laptop since they have valuable images and music and other stuff. I'm not too well versed in what is available in terms of a one stop solution.

Ideally it would work like Time Machine on a mac where they just plug in the drive and it does a full image and then incremental backups from there-automatically. Is there a bundle of USB drive + software that can do that? Are they stuck spending 100 bucks for a 500GB drive + another 50 bucks for acronis?

The key here is brain dead simple (I don't want to do the tech support :rolleyes: ) and ideally a USB with software that will image the laptops drive...

Any thoughts are welcome!
 
I think I have seen bundles like that at Best Buy, but I can't think of the name of the software that was included. If you do find a good solution, let us know please.
 
I think I have seen bundles like that at Best Buy, but I can't think of the name of the software that was included. If you do find a good solution, let us know please.

I've looked a bit on Google and only found stuff that syncs folders. I'd really like for it to image as the worst case scenario is pretty easy to recover from... After having WHS installed I am a total believer in image based backups.
 
Well while it doesn't fall into the price range you stated, the most unobtrusive image backup software I have used is storage crafts shadow protect desktop. It is fast, has flexible scheduling abilities, will backup across a network or to external drives, and one thing I really liked was the ability to do a hardware independent restore. Ever try restoring your Dell image to your HP?...lol But in a more real world case, some imaging software fails if you restore to a smaller drive, which could occur even if you buy the same size drive for your lappy, but it has a few more bad sectors... (yup, voice o experience there.)
At under $200 bucks to cover my two work laptops and the home machine, (3 machine bundle) I think it is worth it. They will provide a full evaluation copy for 30 days to see if it suits your needs.
Worth a look IMHO.
 
I think your prices are off by a factor of 2. . . $60 on amazon for the drive, and $24 for Acronis (assuming you get the super saver shipping)= $84. I've been using Acronis stuff for years with complete satisfaction for my home backup needs.
 
Doesn't the Maxtor "One Touch" series of drives do this? I forget the software that comes with them, but I had one a few years ago and in the event of a total system failure, you could hold down a button on the external drive as the system booted and it would restore the last backup on the drive. I never had to try it so I can't say how well, or even if it worked...

Terry

EDIT: typos...
 
Doesn't the Maxtor "One Touch" series of drives do this? I forget the software that comes with them, but I had one a few years ago and in the event of a total system failure, you could hold down a button on the external drive as the system booted and it would restore the last backup on the drive. I never had to try it so I can't say how well, or even if it worked...

Terry

EDIT: typos...


It looks like the 'one touch' does file based backups not image based backups. Thanks for the tip on Acronis off of Amazon, that is going to be my recommendation.
 
Wow, for $24 I was ready to buy Arconis True Image too. There are some really negative reviews on Amazon though so that has me a little worried. Is anyone here using 2010 desktop?

Terry
 
For image based backups I have always used Symantec / Norton Ghost. I do not know if you can do on the fly image based backups though.

I like the idea of booting to a disk and running with the OS not being loaded. I have never had an issue when restoring an image. I use this as my once a year clean up restore method.
 
Wow, for $24 I was ready to buy Arconis True Image too. There are some really negative reviews on Amazon though so that has me a little worried. Is anyone here using 2010 desktop?

Terry

I read those reviews also and they led me to search the web for other reviews. I found many and Acronis has a very good name. I am deeply suspicious that the reviews on Amazon are spammed. I looked at the 1 star reviews and they were mostly single reviews while the positive reviewers had reviews of other products that were diverse. Many ways to interpret this data (pissed off people like to write bad reviews while happy customers say nothing?) I wish that there was a trust scheme built into the reviews.
 
Dunno. I'm running home 2009 on XP and 2000- seems like a bunch of the complaints are around windows 7. I'll agree that the user interface could be simpler. . . several screens to go through to set up a backup. But once you have it set, you are pretty much done. My ancient computer has some kind of update issue where it can't be rebooted, so I need to restore every couple of months. Acronis has been there for me. Never needed support, so I can't speak to that.
 
For image based backups I have always used Symantec / Norton Ghost. I do not know if you can do on the fly image based backups though.

Ghost has always been a good program. Shadow I found to be faster, and it will do a running image as you work if you want it to.
 
I use Macrium Free Edition, you set up a image settings file of the partition you wish to backup then you can set backups (or run it from command line with parameters, I was going to schedule it from an event in HomeSeer) and the image file can be saved over the network or onto a usb drive.

Only a couple of days ago I imaged my main HA machine running XP, saved the image to another computer, then using the software put the image onto another different HD and it worked first time...I was expecting at least one or two slight problems.

And its free for the personal edition...
 
I've used imaging to update my laptop drives. Typcally though I build (new ones I rebuild) all the PCs'/Laptops into two main partitions one being the OS / application partition and the other the data partition. I tend to have my own methodology for my PC's imaging / restoral versus the neighbors and friends methodology of same.

Historically always just backing up the data partition. For neighbors and friends what I have seen is that typically a "new" OS installation lasts only about 6 months. By then (even with antivirus / malware protection) the PC has become so slow it'll take 10 minutes to get to their home page. Imaging and restoral of said partition is kind of a futile endeavor in that what is actually only needed are the saved data (pictures, music, docs, etc). Typcally then they come to me when their PCs/Laptops take 20 minutes to boot. I then (almost every time) show them how to save their data in one place for recovery and backup purposes. I do save an initial OS/Application image and do tend to use this and then restore all of the saved data once the initial image has been restored. One issue I have had is that you can't read the "Smartdrive" status on a USB connected drive alerting you of any premature failure of said drive. To the average non computer literate person a snapshot one button does all image backup is the simplest and fastest to use both with backup and restoral and whatever that person feels most confortable with.
 
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