OK, I have been quite busy with a few projects, not the least of which has been evaluating backup solutions.  So, you might be interested in what I have chosen.

Well, let me set out my criteria, as yours might be different.  I also want to be as fair as possible in my review.  Of course, there are things that just “must” be in the tool itself, or it is worthless.  Then, there are things it “should” do, but I realize there are alternatives if the tool cannot do it.  What my needs are:

1. Must be able to snapshot the drive.  Some backup utilities only backup files.  That’s all well and good unless you are trying to recover quickly from a totally down system.  I need something that at least will recreate partitions so they are bootable, but I’d prefer entire drive images.
2. Must supply a bootable CD or way to backup and restore without Windows if necessary.
3. Must have an understandable license scheme without breaking the bank.  Must be able to use in a business environment, especially for support.
4. Should have boot manager capability to be able to boot into a recovery partition on the hard drive.
5. Should have a way to resize partitions.
6. Should have a way to create differentials.  This would especially be nice if it can do it from images.
7. Should be able to wipe a drive clean.

I tested some of the software out on my laptop, but the real test was on a couple of really low end machines.  Actually, I ended up picking the software on the worst of the 2 if that gives you any idea how I was impressed by it.

OK, now the contenders were Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite, Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image Home 2010.  Each of them had pros and cons, but what surprised me was which won out.

Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite

Paragon seems to be an interesting company.  They have a myriad of products, and frankly it was weeks just trying to figure out what was free and when vs what could be used commercially.  It really gave me a headache.  I downloaded a whole slew of free, not so free and higher end products just trying to sort out which was which.

When I finally picked something to try out, I downloaded Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite, as that seemed the most comprehensive.  I was impressed how it worked on the laptop.  However, I didn’t want to risk my laptop for extensive testing, so I tested it on an HP Pavilion 750n.  As you can imagine, it was slow.  Of course, the PC needed to be wiped anyhow (which is why I could muck with it), so a lot of that might have been due to just junk on the machine.  However, I booted from the recovery CD, and recovery wasn’t that much faster.

OK, so how much is this software?  Frankly, I’m still not sure.  As I said before, there are a myriad number of products that seem to have a lot of overlap with different licensing schemes.

However, I did find out there is a tech license as well.  When I read it, though, I almost fell to the floor because it was so restrictive!  You have to install it on a machine (already a strike as there seems to be no way to do a backup from CD), do your business and then remove it.  It gets worse.  You can only keep copies of the backups for 14 days.  Say, what?  Then, you can have it at only one location.  Again, say what?  Oh, and you can spend around $1,000 per year for this privilege.

On a side note, I noticed they just changed the Technician License since I did the evaluation.  I no longer see the 14 day restriction.  The price is now about $800 per year.

Norton Ghost

I remember my days running a computer lab, where Norton Ghost was king.  I’m old enough to remember Norton Utilities for MSDOS, and Ghost was about the only worthwhile thing left from an era where Norton had a solid reputation.

We used to make boot disks (not CDs), usually from Windows 98, and we would run Ghost from a floppy.  Usually, the images were on a CD, but we did get some larger enough hard drives to put multiple operating system images on a smaller partition and recreate whatever test environment we needed that way.  The only hitch was ensuring the Windows license wasn’t being violated (we had a combination of site licensing and MS Developer Network, the latter being more restrictive about who could use the systems).

So, I had high hopes.  I downloaded Norton Ghost 14.0.

Well, I kept hearing rumors about a recovery CD, but I couldn’t figure out where to find it.  I did do a backup with it, but I had to run it from Windows.

However, the worst was the license.  Yes, I scrolled down and read all of the legalese, and it cannot be used “commercially”.  What does that mean?  AFAIK, using software for “commercial” uses includes using it in a business.  So, tells me it cannot even be used in a test lab any more.  So, who else really needs software like this, anyhow?

It seems they have rebranded it as “backup software”.  Technically, it isn’t, but it can be used for that purpose.  It seems like they are also targeting home users.  However, the price, $70, is quite high for an individual license (one of Paragon’s products for home use is less than $40).

Acronis True Image Home 2010

I have to admit I was getting a little discouraged at this point.  I seriously considered forgetting the whole drive image thing and just use Ubuntu to back the files up.  As it turns out, what the others lack, Ubuntu can fill in the gaps, but I’m jumping ahead at this point.

So, I downloaded Acronis True Image Home 2010.  However, I first scoured all of the product information trying to figure out if it did backups from a CD or not.  It took a lot of searching, and it does!  However, you have to have the paid version to actually try it out.

Like Norton, it creates a drive image, so that is good.  I backed up the HP and was able to recover it just fine.  However, it was still slow.  I then put it on a machine I was rebuilding for the remainder of the tests.

Now, the HP had only 512 MB RAM.  However, this new one only had 250 MB!  Yet, when I ran the backup and restore on it, it went faster.  I then realized it was the USB 2.0 that made it faster.  So, even though Acronis was faster than either Paragon or Norton on the HP, it was still slow as long as I was using USB 1.0, even though the memory on the new machine was only half!  If you have eSATA, it should go even faster.  I am still experimenting with that option.

OK, after quite a bit of mucking around (I was still rebuilding this machine, after all), I then tried to resize a partition.  Well, I couldn’t find a way to do that.  You have to buy a separate utility, Acronis Disk Director (another $50) to do that!  So, that was a disappointment.  However, I wanted to create an “Acronis Secure Zone” (ASZ), which is basically their way of saying a recovery partition, which is why I wanted to resize it to begin with.  So, I attempted to use their program to create it.  It looked like it was going to work, but it utterly failed (and not with a real meaningful error message, either).

So, was it the lack of memory?  I don’t know. believe so because even after a memory upgrade, it still wouldn’t resize a partition even for creating a secure zone.  So, it appears that another utility will be required to resize partitions.

So, I booted from Ubuntu and resized the partition that way.  I created a large free area at the end to create a backup/recovery partition (I got a sweet deal on a hard drive from NewEgg.com).  Then, I booted back into Windows and tried to create the ASZ again.  It worked!

Then, I created a boot manager using Acronis so I can press [F11] at startup to go into the boot partition.

Unfortunately, at this point, Windows updates started to rule the day and rebooted at a VERY inconvenient time, so that’s about as far as I got.  However, it was obvious from my previous tests that restore works quite nicely.

OK, now the dreaded license question.  After searching for a while, it looks like the software license is tied to the machine.  I don’t have a solid answer on that, but it looks like if you sell the computer, the software goes with it.  You can reuse the license only if you decommission the old computer.  It wasn’t clear from reading the docs what the license scheme was, and it sounded like it was tied to the actual computer.  I emailed them asking them about this.  The answer I got is that the software is licensed to the user.  So, the ideal would be for the owner of the computer to purchase the license.

In fact, my real disappointment isn’t even with the software.  I emailed my question to them and got no a response after two weeks.  I also filled out an application to be a reseller, and still no response to that question.  I have to assume, therefore, that if the software gives me a problem and I cannot find the answer in the online forum or help files, then I may be alone on my own for quite a while.

Yet, the software seems to work well, and at least there seem to be an active forum, so it doesn’t seem that bad.

Overall, it does the first 4 of the criteria just fine.  It also can do either incremental or differentials from the image, so 6 is covered as well.  After purchasing the full version, I noticed Acronis True Image Home has a utility for wiping the hard disk as well, but I haven’t tried it yet.  The fact that it does 5 6 out of the 7 is impressive to me, and for only $50.

Resizing partitions can be done in Ubuntu.  There also seems to be an “erase” in Ubuntu’s Disk Utility, but at best I can determine, it really only formats the drive.  If I were to resell a computer, I would want to wipe the hard drive instead.

However, apparently, t There also is a shred command on Ubuntu that does the same thing.  Once you find out the drive to wipe, just issue the command

shred –vfz –n 3 /dev/hda

to wipe the entire first hard disk 3 times with 0s.

Or,

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda bs=512

for the number of times to wipe.

Then, there is DBAN, but that seems to be for more industrial strength applicaitons.

Conclusion

It really seems like the only sane way to go is with Acronis for backup/restore and recovery partition creation.  For reparationing repartitioning and wiping, I can use Ubuntu, esp. for the former.

I’m especially disappointed at Norton Ghost, though.  Not only is their licensing scheme missing the biggest potential users, but they seem to be actively pushing them away (apparently for other “enterprise” products, as far as I can tell).  On top of that, it just doesn’t seem to be the same animal I had dealt with in the past.  However, given Symantec’s track record with other software, I suppose it was only a matter of time before they messed that one up as well.

Paragon still looks promising for certain users in certain environments, and it does look like they are trying to clean up their product line so it isn’t as confusing.  However, I’m still not sure what my bottom line would be in a commercial venture for what I would need.  They would also have to be able to backup from CD before I would seriously consider it.  I mean, why install and then uninstall on users’ PCs all the time?

At least with Acronis, it looks like as long as the user is purchasing the license for their machine, there are no other insane restrictions.