PC Mag.com - Drive-Imaging: Beyond Backup
ARTICLE DATE: 02.12.08
You may never have had a hard drive fail or become so corrupted that your data was beyond retrieval, but that doesn't mean you never will. And think of this: If your system ever fails in a hardware or software disaster, will you really have time to reinstall Windows and all your applications and tweak all your OS and application settings? I'm guessing the answer is no. I certainly don't. This is why you need a drive-imaging program that backs up your complete system—including all your data and applications—and can restore it all in minutes.
Traditional backup programs (we'll be looking at those in the near future) back up your documents, photos, music, and spreadsheets. Drive-imaging programs do much more. They do back up your data, of course, but they also back up your applications, your whole Windows system, and all the low-level drivers and software that you normally never notice but without which Windows can't manage. An ordinary backup program copies your files. A drive-imaging program makes a byte-by-byte duplicate of your full hard drive (or of one or more partitions if you've divided your physical drive into multiple logical drives), maintaining the identical data structure.
Hence, if your drive fails, you can pop in a new drive and restore your system to exactly the state it was in when you made the drive image. For that matter, if your system becomes unstable because you installed software that won't uninstall cleanly, you simply write over the drive (or partition) with the stable system you were using a few days ago. You've probably noticed that Windows' System Restore often doesn't restore your system because it doesn't image your drive. Instead, it performs fancy tricks with the Windows Registry and other Windows files—tricks that work on a clean, simple system but are too complicated to perform reliably on a heavily used real-world system. Drive-imaging software, by contrast, always restores your system.
Of course, you could achieve the same result by reinstalling Windows and all your drivers and applications—if you can find them again. And then you could use a conventional backup program to restore your data. But that process would likely take a day or two, if you're lucky, and your system still won't have all the tweaks and customizations that make it your own.
Drive-imaging software is worth having even if your hard drive never fails. You can use the software to clone a single system to multiple computers. Some products let you make an image of your current Windows system and then transfer the whole system to a new computer that uses different hardware without installing Windows from scratch—something that's normally impossible when you upgrade to a new machine.
Today's imaging software can work in the background even while you're running your system. It can also create incremental backups, which speed the process by storing just the changes made to your drive since the last full backup. If your drive or system fails, you can boot from an emergency CD, then restore your system from the backup image. Most of these products provide a bootable CD that you can use to boot your machine when Windows won't boot from the hard drive, or when you don't want to boot to a corrupted Windows system. If you boot from the emergency CD, you can run the imaging software from a copy of the software on the CD itself—you don't need to use the copy installed on your hard drive. You can then restore your system from an image backup on an external, network, or DVD drive, or even from an image that you stored on a partition of your hard drive that you use for storing data.
Even when your system is running smoothly, these utilities can help you out by letting you dig into a backup image to get back an older version of any file on your system. Imaging software includes a feature that lets you "mount" an image so that it appears as a drive letter in Windows Explorer, then copy files from the mounted image to your hard drive. These products can also copy partitions from one physical hard drive to another, a feature most useful with partitions that contain data only (rather than a full Windows system, since, on a new machine, the OS usually requires an actual installation). —
What I Found
I tested five products. Four were products you have to pay for:
All the utilities here can save to the same physical hard drive that you're backing up, and can even save a copy of your Windows system partition to that very same partition—a feat that sounds impossible but isn't, although I wouldn't recommend doing so. Or rather, it's fine to do so, but not exclusively. Hard drives aren't immortal; eventually yours will fail, so you should store your backups to a hard drive that plugs into a USB, FireWire, or eSATA port, to another computer on your network, or to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. You can also use removable media, like Iomega REV disks or writable DVDs, though you'll be stuck feeding disks into the device. In any case, if you're serious about preserving your data, use a storage medium that you can store off-site.
The commercial products let you use Windows Explorer to browse a backed-up image just as you would a real drive on your system; DriveImage XML has its own custom file browser that works almost as well. In the commercial products, the backed-up image acts as a virtual drive that gets its own drive letter. You can view the backed-up files by double-clicking on them in Explorer, or you can copy files from the virtual drive to your real one. DriveImage XML freeware product uses a built-in file manager instead of Explorer to achieve the same results. With most of the products, this virtual drive is read-only: You can copy files from it, but you can't write to it or modify existing files. But a unique and valuable feature in ShadowProtect Desktop lets you write back to a virtual drive so that you can, for example, run a virus-removal program on a backed-up image if you later discover that a virus has been lurking on your system and got into your backups.
For safety and convenience, I divide my hard drive into multiple partitions, keeping all my documents in a single dedicated partition that's separate from the one my Windows system is on. I use drive-imaging software to make full twice-monthly and daily incremental backups of both so that I can easily recover last week's version of any file or restore my Windows partition to the state it was in before I installed the software that wrecked it. The image backup of my document partition also lets me effortlessly transfer all my documents to a new computer.
One important word of warning before you try out these products: Never install more than one on your system at the same time. These utilities use low-level disk-access features built into Windows, and if you have two simultaneously installed—even if only one is running—one or both won't work. If you decide to try out more than one, be sure to completely uninstall the first and restart your system before installing the next. —
What about Macs?
Of course, Mac fans are probably shaking their heads in disbelief at what Windows users put up with, in cost and complexity, to get backup imaging. Mac devotees still running OS X 10.4 Tiger must turn to third-party imaging software, just like their Windows-using colleagues, but they will find it a lot simpler. The two programs I use are the freeware Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! ($27.95, direct). Both support automatic scheduled backups, are blissfully worry-free, and have restored my Mac to perfect condition.
If you use OS X 10.5 (Leopard), you've already got drive-backup software. Just plug in a USB or FireWire external drive and the OS will offer to start backing up all your files automatically with the built-in Time Machine, a feature that keeps hourly backups of your work on the current day and retains a single daily backup for each previous day. Time Machine lets you grab any file or version of a file from the past and restore it. If your hard drive fails, you can simply boot from the OS X DVD that came with your system, fire up Time Machine, and restore your whole system. Maybe someday Windows will catch up with this kind of convenience, but don't bet on it.
Microsoft includes an image backup feature in Vista, but not one that you'll want to use in a real-world system. In Vista Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (but not in other versions), use the Start Menu, go to All Programs, then System and Maintenance, then the Backup and Restore Center, where you'll find an option to back up your entire computer. This option creates an image backup either on a hard disk or DVDs. You can restore the image by booting from the Vista installation DVD to the Vista Recovery Environment. Unfortunately, unlike Time Machine or commercial imaging products, Vista only makes complete image backups, not automatically-scheduled incremental backups, and can only restore a system from an image stored on a local hard disk or DVDs, not from your network. Also, you can't browse through a backed-up image to extract individual files. This is where Vista gives you a few crumbs, while OS X gives you the whole cake.
I've used many of these programs on my home-office system, and they've rescued it when badly written software slowed or damaged it. Rebooting to an emergency CD, navigating to a backed-up image, and restoring my system to exactly the same condition it was in when I made my backup took just minutes. You may not go to the lengths I do to back up documents, but think about how you'd feel if you lost your photos, music, documents, and other files. And remember how much work it took to get your system to work the way you wanted. If your backup strategy doesn't use imaging software, don't wait until the sun goes down to start.
Below are links to our reviews of five of the leading drive-imaging products. As always, click the links to read the full reviews.
This program's ability not just to perform drive imaging but also to back up and restore specific folders and settings makes it the most flexible backup utility I know. But users with complex systems should watch out for potential problems with the emergency restore CD.
This application may have limited features, but it's solid drive-imaging software, and, best of all, it's free. You'll need to dust off your propeller beanie to implement it, though.
This is flexible, powerful drive-imaging and file-backup software with an exceptionally clear interface and lots of scheduling options, but a networking problem with its emergency CD keeps it from being an Editors' Choice.
This is a flexible, advanced drive backup-and-restore utility. The help file can be opaque, however, and the interface could be daunting to casual users.
This software provides the fastest and smoothest backups and restores of any drive-image utility on the market, and a Vista-based emergency disk guarantees compatibility with the widest range of backup hardware. ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 is the best such product and worth ten times its price in terms of peace of mind and flexibility.
REVIEW DATE: 02.07.08
This program's ability not just to perform drive imaging but also to back up and restore specific folders and settings makes it the most flexible backup utility I know. But users with complex systems should watch out for potential problems with the emergency restore CD.
PROS:
Backs up folders, settings, and e-mail as well as creating drive images. Supports experimenting with new software before committing changes to hard drive. Includes disk cleanup and security software.
CONS:
Linux-based emergency CD gets confused by complex systems. So-called "Secure Zone" isn't secure if hard drive fails.
COMPANY:
Acronis Inc
This software performs more backup feats than any other drive-imaging software. As with its peers, it creates images of whole drives, but it can also back up individual folders, e-mails, and program settings, and it lets you try out changes to your system before deciding whether to keep them. It's slower than our Editors' Choice product,
Like its commercial challengers, True Image creates full backup images of whole drives or individual partitions. It can also create regular incremental backups automatically so that you can restore your system to the state it was in when you made the last complete drive image or when you made any incremental backup. The utility creates and restores backups more slowly than ShadowProtect Desktop, but at a speed similar to that of Norton Ghost 12.0 and
Snap Restore, a feature unique to True Image, reboots into Windows, instantly restores the files needed to run the system, and then restores the rest of the drive in the background while you continue to work. But the background activity slowed my system so badly that simply waiting for the ordinary restore process to complete and then getting back to work probably would have been faster.
True Image and Norton Ghost also let me back up e-mail from Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Mail as well as folders, including My Documents. In addition, both allowed me to narrow backups to specific types of files (Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, for example). Furthermore, each has a trigger feature that launches a backup whenever a user logs on or off the system or when a specified number of megabytes gets added to the hard drive. Ghost's trigger implementation is more flexible. On the other hand, True Image let me choose to back up application settings, such as my Internet Explorer favorites. None of the other products I tested allowed me to do this. These extra features will be enough to make Acronis the first choice for many.—
Working with True Image
True Image is divided into four task categories: basic backup and restore operations, a Try&Decide feature that lets you experiment with your system without making permanent changes, disk cleanup and copying utilities, and management tools for setting up shortcuts to backup locations you want to reuse or for keeping track of existing archives. Other than four icons representing these sets of tasks, the opening screen shows only warnings about problems that may have occurred during recent tasks. Annoyingly, unless you use the menu system, you have to go back to the opening screen to switch from one task category to another. You can jump to specific tasks using the menu, but the menu organizes the tasks in categories differently from those of the opening screen—a poor UI choice that's sure to confuse.
Boxed copies of True Image ship with a Linux-based emergency CD, but even if you downloaded the utility you can burn the emergency disc yourself using a wizard in the main program. The emergency CD should work well for most users in most situations. I used it successfully to restore images from my D-Link DNS-323 Network Attached Storage unit back to the computer booted from the CD. This is exactly what I would do if my computer's Windows system had become corrupted and I had to restore it, or if that computer's drive had failed and I had to replace it.
I was taken aback, however, when I tried to restore an image I had saved on an external drive attached by a FireWire cable. The emergency CD got confused by the multiple partitions (C: through H:) on the internal hard drive in the machine from which I booted the CD. The CD mistakenly assigned the drive letter G: to the external FireWire drive and failed to list the actual drive G: when enumerating the partitions on my internal hard drive.
At this point, I turned off my machine. I wasn't about to risk my system by restoring an image using software that misunderstood my hard drive's organization. I should emphasize that this problem occurred only with a FireWire external drive, not a USB drive—but it didn't happen at all with ShadowProtect Desktop or Paragon Personal. Acronis doesn't explain this, but it seems fairly clear that the Linux version the company uses for the emergency CD has weak FireWire support. This may be because some Linux versions are taking a long time to get its FireWire support up to the level of its USB support. This exact problem probably won't affect you, but I'd still hesitate to use any product that displays problems of this kind. Even if the emergency CD worked perfectly with my current hardware, I wouldn't be confident that it would still work if I had to use it on a new computer with the latest hardware. You could ignore this warning if you could be absolutely certain that your current hardware would last forever, and that you'd never have to restore a backup image to a machine with a new motherboard or a new disk technology, but that's not something you can be certain about.—
Try and Decide with Try&Decide
A True Image option will create an area on your hard drive for storing backups, but this Secure Zone facility, as the utility calls it, is misnamed: It's secure only until your hard drive fails, and then it's probably useless. You'd be better off storing backups on one or more external drives. But the terrific feature called Try&Decide lets you experiment with your system by temporarily writing disk changes to the Secure Zone area instead of directly to your system drive.
Try&Decide let me test the effect of an update to Microsoft Office before committing myself to keeping it, and I would probably turn the feature on before making any major software changes. I couldn't detect any system slowdown when I used it, and it's a superb safety net for anyone who experiments with software. If I felt really paranoid about system changes, I could even set Try&Decide to turn itself on automatically every time I booted up. Unfortunately, though, the feature does have some notable limitations. Once you commit your changes to the hard drive, you can't return your system to an earlier state. For that, you'd need to restore from a backup image, or use a dedicated drive snapshot program like Roxio BackOnTrack 3 Suite.
Also note that while using Try&Decide, you can't save backups using Secure Zone. True Image doesn't warn you about this when a backup tries to run, though; it simply alerts you that the backup failed. Even if you probe the log files, you'll learn only that the program couldn't get exclusive access to the Secure Zone area; you won't be told that you have to turn off Try&Decide. Unless you know what's wrong, you'll be alarmed to see a red banner on the program's main screen shouting that your backups have failed but giving no reason.
If you want, you can also use the Secure Zone area to store a copy of the Linux-based True Image version so it's available whenever you boot up, even if you don't have a copy of the emergency CD. When you do this, your system prompts you at boot-up to press F11 if you want to launch True Image or simply wait a few seconds to boot normally into Windows. If you turn on this feature, True Image overwrites your hard drive's Master Boot Record (MBR), a change that won't bother most home and business users, but advanced users may be reluctant. Those who have Linux and Windows installed on the same system will have to reinstall the Linux boot loader after True Image changes the MBR. Even if you use only Windows, however, you may instinctively distrust (as I do) any third-party software that makes this kind of low-level change to your drive. It's been years since I've experienced an actual problem with third-party programs that overwrite the MBR, but I feel safer if the MBR remains in the state that Windows or the computer manufacturer left it in.
Paragon Personal has a feature called Backup Capsule that, like Secure Zone, creates a special area on a drive and stores backup images as well as a copy of the program that can be used in an emergency. It has the same potential risks as Secure Zone, but at least it doesn't call itself "secure." The Paragon Personal Backup Capsule doesn't have the equivalent of Try&Decide, though.
I've used True Image's basic backup and restore functions for years without experiencing major problems, but I have mixed feelings about the vast range of features built into the most recent versions. The program used to have the same tight focus on image backup and restore that I like in ShadowProtect Desktop, but Acronis seems to have expanded the feature set without fixing basic problems like the one I encountered with the emergency CD. If you're considering True Image, I suggest you visit the official Acronis support forum at Wilders Security Forums and read some of the problem reports submitted by users.
True Image gets more kinds of backup jobs done than any of its rivals, and if you have a plain-vanilla home or SOHO system, this product will do all you need and more—provided you don't run into the kind of compatibility issues I experienced, and which also seem to be reported often on the company's own support forums. Many difficulties that users report on the forums result from simple mistakes in reading the menus, but a number of others involve problems restoring from backups, and Acronis isn't as quick as ShadowProtect in responding to or resolving these reported problems. This is a high-quality, mature program that's surprisingly flexible, but Acronis won't be ready to challenge ShadowProtect for our Editors' Choice until it focuses more on its core functions and less on the size of its feature set.
More Backup Software Reviews:
REVIEW DATE: 02.11.08
DriveImage XML may have limited features, but it's solid drive-imaging software, and it's free.
PROS:
Free. Command-line interface allows running program from batch files.
CONS:
No incremental backups. Can't write to DVD. You must build your own emergency boot CD.
COMPANY:
Runtime Software
DriveImage XML does a lot less than other drive-imaging programs, but it costs nothing, and it does just as good a job as they do of the essential tasks of backing up, browsing, and restoring drive images. It does these jobs more slowly, and it can't make incremental backups (the kind that quickly supplement full backups with changes made since the initial backup), and it's only suitable for users who like building their own emergency boot CD. If you've already built a BartPE boot disk, DriveImage XML is the kind of imaging software you want. If you've never heard of BartPE and you don't know what I'm talking about, read on.
You've heard that backing up is hard to do? Not with this utility. You simply choose Backup from the main menu, select a local drive to back up (the program won't let you back up network drives), click on Next, and pick a destination (which can be any local or network drive). Like all the other products in this category, you can save the image to the same drive that you're backing up. If you opt to save to the same drive, you'll probably also want to copy the image to a safer location afterward. Though you can't save directly to DVD media, an option will split the image into multiple files suitable for copying by hand to DVDs after the backup is complete. You can't back up individual files, but I prefer whole-drive backups anyway.
DriveImage XML has one geek-level feature I like: A command-line interface lets you control the utility through an old-style batch file to fine-tune backup procedures and delete or rename existing backups. You have to write your own batch files, of course, but for experienced batch-file gurus, that's faster than using the other products' wizards. I'm not thrilled, though, that DriveImage XML won't run under Vista until you turn off User Access Control (UAC). While I dislike UAC as much as you do, it's a valuable security feature, and I'd prefer to leave it on.—
How DriveImage XML Works
To extract files from an image, you use the browse feature from the product's main menu, which opens a tree-structured file-viewing program that looks like a ten-year-old version of Windows Explorer. I liked the toolbar that let me extract, launch, and view files. The view feature uses a Notepad-style file viewer from which you can copy text to the Windows clipboard, but I prefer the ability that competing programs give me to browse a backup image in Explorer.
Restoring an image can be tricky with DriveImage XML. You can use the program's main menu to restore partitions to your local hard drive—unless you want to restore to your system partition. In that case you have to boot to an emergency boot CD—and you have to provide that CD for yourself using the freeware, open-source BartPE (Bart Preboot Environment) devised by Bart Lagerweij and available from www.nu2.nu. Don't even think about trying this if you've never at least tried on a propeller beanie: Although the process isn't especially difficult, the instructions are long and complicated, and you'll need an up-to-date Windows XP installation CD—not the restore disc that came with your mail-order computer, but a full-fledged installation CD that can install XP on any machine.
I don't exactly enjoy building BartPE discs, and I've never spent the time I would need to incorporate all the add-ons preferred by BartPE experts, but I climbed the learning curve a few years ago, and I don't mind taking a few minutes to create a new CD every now and then. All I needed to do to create a BartPE disc that would let me restore a DriveImage XML image to my system was download a DriveImage XML plug-in for BartPE from the DriveImage XML Web site, install the plug-in to my existing BartPE-building environment, and burn a new CD that includes a copy of DriveImage XML. Once I booted from my new BartPE CD, I could click on the BartPE menu, open the copy of DriveImage XML already on the CD, and back up or restore any drive in my system. If reading this last paragraph makes your head hurt, DriveImage XML probably isn't for you. If, on the other hand, it sounds old hat, you should definitely consider it.
DriveImage XML is a long-established and reliable program that's more or less certain to work without fuss or failures. I value my data enough to prefer a program with more options and the ability to make incremental backups, but if I had to use DriveImage XML instead of its competition, I certainly wouldn't complain. But then again, I'm not frightened by BartPE.
More Backup Software Reviews:
REVIEW DATE: 02.08.08
This is a flexible, powerful drive-imaging and file-backup program with an exceptionally clear interface and lots of scheduling options, but a networking problem with its emergency CD keeps it from receiving an Editors' Choice.
PROS:
Simple interface with a unique calendar view of past and scheduled backups. Backs up drives and files with ultra-flexible scheduling options, including backups when a specified application launches.
CONS:
Emergency disc couldn't see network on test systems.
COMPANY:
Symantec Corporation
This software inherits the name of the original Ghost (the first widely used drive-imaging software released by Binary Research in 1996) but none of the code, so I wouldn't buy it based on its ancestry. On the other hand, I might recommend buying Norton Ghost 12.0 because it has the best interface of any drive-imaging competitor, and it's the only product of its kind that won't frighten a completely nontechnical user. I admire many things about it, especially the capability it gives you to have specific events trigger a backup, but I encountered enough glitches to keep me from preferring it to our Editors' Choice product,
Like all its commercial rivals, Norton Ghost can create full backups of your drives, supplemented by scheduled incremental backups that include only changes made since the last full backup. What's more, the utility can save backup images on local or network drives or on writable DVDs. Like
When I loaded Norton Ghost's emergency boot CD, I expected to have as good an experience as I had had with the ShadowProtect Desktop emergency CD, because both products make use of the up-to-date hardware support built into Windows Vista. Unfortunately, the networking setup on the emergency CD never found my network from any of the three attached test systems, so I couldn't restore my system from my Network Attached Storage. None of the emergency CDs of the other products I was testing at the same time had this problem, which, for me, rules out Norton Ghost as a backup solution. Though many users have reported no problems, others have related similar difficulties. If you back up to a network location, you may want to try Norton Ghost before you buy it.—
Norton Ghost: What I Liked
One of things I do like about the utility is its lucid, spacious interface, which makes every option easily accessible without cluttering the screen. Norton Ghost uses the standard left-panel toolbar and large right-panel information window to lay out its features. This is more or less the way its competitors do things, too, but Ghost is especially well organized. Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised in a few areas, such as a calendar view that showed me the dates on which I had already made backups and the dates on which future backups were scheduled.
What impressed me most was an option that starts an incremental backup when specific events occur on the computer, such as a user logging on or off, a particular application being launched, or a certain amount of data being added to the drive. It's similar to a capability in True Image Home, but Norton Ghost gives you many more triggers. This feature is probably most useful in corporate settings with acres of storage space, but other users might want it as an easy way to link a backup set with specific events rather than particular times (which Norton Ghost also lets you do).
I also liked the way Norton Ghost implements its other tools. A feature that copies backup images from one location to another let me take an image I had saved to a network drive and make a copy elsewhere. Another option will break up an existing image into smaller-size chunks that can fit onto DVDs—a nice touch.
I also like the way Norton Ghost uses an internal file browser for browsing and extracting files from image backups. With other commercial products, you browse through image backups by opening them as "virtual drives" in Windows Explorer so that each backup that you open gets a drive letter of its own. If you need to browse through more than one backup, it's easy to get confused over which one is currently "Drive D" and which one is "Drive E." With Norton, you use a special-purpose file manager that always displays exactly which backup image you're viewing—but you also get the option of clicking on a toolbar if you want to open the image in Explorer, where you can use all the conveniences available in the right-click menu.—
Norton Ghost: What I Didn't Like
What I didn't especially like about Norton Ghost was its slowness in writing backups to DVDs, especially compared with the speedy ShadowProtect. And when I first installed the boxed Norton Ghost CD under Vista, I was taken aback by the number of error messages the program threw at me regarding its inability to "connect" to the system—not very illuminating information for nontechnical users. The messages, and the errors that caused them, disappeared after I ran the Live Update feature to update the program on the CD to the latest version, but it was unsettling to find that the version on the CD had so much trouble with Windows Vista, which had already been released when this version of Ghost was released.
I'm also bothered by the many problem reports circulating on the Internet about failures in the program that Symantec's minimally expert tech support staff wasn't able to solve. I've learned to rely on online forums for tech support because they serve as repositories of users' experiences and real-world solutions, and I was struck by the fact that Symantec doesn't sponsor an online support forum for Norton Ghost. A Web search brought me to a lively but unofficial Ghost-users' mutual-support forum at radified.com, but the site showed no trace of participation from Symantec. The contrast between Symantec's total lack of an online forum on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the official support forum for ShadowProtect Desktop (with its almost instant responses by the vendor's own experts) was striking.
Symantec is currently working on what I'm told is a minor upgrade, Norton Ghost 14.0 (the company is skipping number 13 to avoid associating a program that's supposed to make you feel secure with an "unlucky" number). Maybe it will fix the networking problem that, for me, ruled out buying this version of the product. Norton Ghost 12.0 has lots of things to like, but if you've been considering it, you may want to wait until we find out what's improved in the next version.
More Backup Software Reviews:
REVIEW DATE: 02.06.08
This is a flexible, advanced drive backup and restore utility. The help file can be opaque, however, and the interface may be daunting to casual users.
PROS:
Reliable drive-image backups and restores. Easy management of multiple archives for restoring old files. Powerful, reliable Linux-based emergency boot CD.
CONS:
Confusing help file; interface suitable for experts only.
COMPANY:
Paragon Software Group
Don't be fooled by "Personal" in the name of this powerful drive-imaging software. Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edition looks as if it's designed for personal use by the kind of people who manage enterprise IT systems. You may prefer this package if you're comfortable with menus that let you back up your hard drive's Master Boot Record and aren't terrified by an option to back up the first track, or if you want to manage multiple backup images from a single archive menu. And if you're a techie needing to restore your system from the program's Linux-based emergency boot CD, you'll thrill to the knowledge that you can open a command line and perform advanced surgery on your drives and files using Linux's most arcane tools. Home and SOHO users who don't want to be bothered with technical details, however, should probably choose something else for their personal drive-imaging product. As a fairly experienced user, I could happily live with this product for drive backups, but I'll stick with
In its feature set, Paragon Drive Backup Personal falls between the needle-sharp focus of ShadowProtect Desktop and the Swiss-Army-knife approach of Acronis True Image 11 Home. Paragon creates and restores backup images of partitions or whole drives, but it doesn't offer True Image Home's ability to back up individual files or settings. Like the competition, Drive Backup Personal uses a two-pane interface, with a list of tools and tasks in a left-hand toolbar, and on the right a larger window for managing drives and backup images. I was impressed to see that I could back up my system without even installing the utility, simply by inserting the emergency CD while Windows was running and choosing the option to run the software directly from the CD without rebooting. I also liked having the option to shut down my system automatically after completing a backup—an ideal feature for anyone who likes to back up a system at the end of the day.—
Unhelpful Help
Like its commercial rivals, Drive Backup Personal uses a wizard for creating backup and restore jobs, but the wizard has a split personality that bothers me a bit. I like that it keeps things simple by hiding encryption and other advanced options unless you check a box marked "Change backup settings" on the first menu.
On the other hand, users who want simple choices will be shocked when they get to the scary-looking menu where they must choose whether to back up individual partitions or the entire drive. This menu's tree-structured view of the drive includes options to back up the first track and Master Boot Record. You can ignore those choices, but non-techies could use a bit of explanatory text—or at least something in a help file.
Unfortunately, you can't access the program's help while using the backup wizard. And even when you return from the wizard to the main tabbed interface, the help system remains hard to use because it's on a tab of its own, so to read it you have to switch away from the menu with which you need help.
Worst of all, though the text looks a bit like English, it certainly doesn't read that way. This sentence is fairly typical: "To synthesize a new property modified archive based on the existed backup images of the selected disk/partition with the Synthetic Backup Wizard, simply do the following." (Don't you love that "simply"?) I think this is about merging (synthesizing) two backup images made from the same drive using different settings, but the whole Synthetic Backup feature isn't even included in the Personal edition, so the help screens about it merely added to the confusion, rather than helping to resolve it.—
Paragon in Action
The product backed up my test system more slowly than the commercial competitors did, and it created an image that was about 20 percent larger than either of those created by True Image Home and ShadowProtect Desktop. Drive Backup Personal supports a feature called Backup Capsule, which, like the True Image Home Secure Zone, carves out a hidden partition on your hard drive and uses it for storing backups. I don't much care for this capability: I want my backups stored on a separate drive in case my main drive becomes physically damaged or unreadable. If you don't have another drive, however, the Backup Capsule is safer than nothing.
Drive Backup Personal uses the Backup Capsule area for backups only; it doesn't match the Try&Decide feature in True Image Home, which lets you experiment with system changes before committing them to your system. As with True Image Home, Drive Backup Personal includes an option that stores a reduced copy of itself on the Backup Capsule, allowing you to boot into the reduced program and restore a damaged Windows system to a previous version. This boot-into-the-restore-program feature overwrites the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your hard drive, and I have reservations about that. It's been years since I've experienced an actual problem with third-party programs that overwrite the MBR, but I feel safer if the MBR remains in the state that Windows or the computer manufacturer left it in.
You can make two different types of emergency boot discs with Drive Backup Personal: a simple MS-DOS-based one that you can burn by choosing an option in the Drive Backup program, and a full-fledged Linux-based emergency disc that you can download as a disc image from the Paragon Web site and then burn to a CD. The DOS-based CD launches a program that performs basic restore and disk-management options on your internal hard drive but can't access backups on external drives or a network. This is the same program that gets stored on the Backup Capsule for emergency use. The DOS program listed a nonexistent drive B: on my test system as a possible source of archives, and when I selected that drive by mistake, the program locked up.
I was a lot more impressed with the full-fledged Linux-based disc, which managed external drives without getting confused by multiple partitions on the internal drive the way the True Image Home Linux-based disc did. You'll need some experience with networking and an understanding of basic Linux to use all the features on the full-fledged Paragon emergency CD, and some of the disc's menus—especially in its networking setup—aren't for the fainthearted.
I was very impressed with Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Personal Edition, and I think any system administrator would be glad to have a copy of its Linux-based emergency CD. While it may be a bit intimidating for less-savvy users, this highly reliable and powerful utility is a good choice for those who need advanced capabilities. It's a close second to our Editors' Choice, the more broadly appealing ShadowProtect Desktop.
More Backup Software Reviews:
REVIEW DATE: 01.30.08
This software provides the fastest and smoothest backups and restores of any drive-image utility on the market, and a Vista-based emergency disk guarantees compatibility with the widest range of backup hardware. ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 is the best such product and worth ten times its price in terms of peace of mind and flexibility.
PROS:
Fast, reliable image backups to local and network drives. Easy restores, even to different hardware. Plentiful scheduling and security options. Can mount images in VMware Workstation or Microsoft Virtual PC.
CONS:
Can't back up specific groups of files.
COMPANY:
StorageCraft Technology Corporation
What I want from backup software is simple: It should work perfectly and fast—and that's exactly what ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1 did on my tests. Maybe the reason this utility is so good at backing up hard drives and restoring whole systems, individual drives, and individual files is that it doesn't try to do anything else. The utility lacks some of the fancy features trumpeted by its commercial competitors, like Acronis True Image 11 Home and
ShadowProtect Desktop creates full and incremental backup images, either on schedule or on demand, and can save them to internal and external hard disks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray media, network drives, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) units. It restores images to your hard drive—or to a different machine—when you need to revive a nonworking system or simply want to go back to an earlier version of a mildly messed-up one.
ShadowProtect Desktop performs the same basic functions as True Image Home and Paragon Drive Backup, but it's breathtakingly fast compared with its rivals. It's also the only program of its kind that creates writable backup images. In Windows Explorer I was able to open a backed-up drive image, modify files, run a virus remover on them, or use any other software to manipulate them—and then save the image in its modified form. Rival products, by contrast, can open backed-up images strictly as read-only drives, so you can copy files out but can't change anything inside. Best of all, ShadowProtect Desktop simply works without surprises no matter what hardware I use.—
Interfacing with ShadowProtect
The interface is standard for this software category—a sidebar on the left for choosing basic tasks and a large panel on the right for viewing backup operations in progress, studying a map of your drives, and giving access to other features. This product isn't for complete beginners, but you don't need to be an expert, either. Setting up a scheduled automated backup routine takes only a few seconds. For my hard drive, I used the wizard interface to schedule monthly image backups and daily incremental backups that saved to a D-Link DNS-323 NAS unit. Every few weeks I also make full backups to a small stack of writable DVDs and a USB-attached external drive.
ShadowProtect Desktop ships on a CD that can install the utility in Windows. The same disc can also work as a bootable emergency CD when I need to restore a drive from a backed-up image, retrieve files from a stored image, or simply retrieve files from a machine that won't boot from Windows. The software uses a reduced version of Vista (the Vista Pre-boot Environment, or Vista PE) for its bootable disc, which means that the emergency CD can access every kind drive Vista can. This makes for much smoother operations than the Linux-based emergency CD used by True Image Home, which was confused by my complex system. Also, when backing up and restoring a Windows-based system, I'm simply more comfortable with an emergency CD based on Vista rather than Linux—even Paragon Drive Backup's excellent Linux-based emergency disc.
Unlike True Image Home, ShadowProtect Desktop doesn't come with software that creates a bootable emergency CD for you if you don't have the original, but registered users can download a burnable ISO image from StorageCraft's Web site and create a bootable CD at any time. Nor will you find a feature like "Secure Zone" or "Backup Capsule," offered by True Image Home and Paragon Drive Backup, that will store a backup to the drive being backed up. But such zones won't protect your data if your drive suffers a physical failure. ShadowProtect Desktop will let you save the images from one partition to another partition on the same physical drive, which is handy. But the app is really designed for storing backup images on separate media that you can safely store. After all, if your machine gets nuked, you'll probably lose both partitions. Still, if you merely overwrite a key file by accident, having a local backup is useful, too.—
Hardware Independent Restoration: Very Cool
The software's most impressive unique feature is its Hardware Independent Restore (HIR), which runs only from the emergency CD. With HIR, you can take an image made on one computer, restore it to another that has entirely different hardware, and be confident that the restored image will boot. You'll probably need to install sound and network drivers for the new system, but you'll be able to boot—a feat you'll rarely manage when you transfer an existing system to a very different machine. Also, you'll be able to use all your existing software and settings without going to the trouble of installing all your programs again.
This feature takes most of the headaches out of upgrading to a new computer. I tested the capability by restoring my normal system to a VMware Workstation virtual machine, and the process was amazingly smooth. It took only 20 minutes to restore a copy of my system and probably would have taken even less time to perform the same trick with real hardware.
I was pleased and surprised to find out that with the two most widely used virtual-computer programs, VMware Workstation and Microsoft's freely downloadable Virtual PC 2007, I didn't even need a copy of ShadowProtect to boot a drive image—provided, of course, that the image was an image of a bootable drive. I could simply select the drive image as a new machine in VMware Workstation or Virtual PC, wait a few moments, and the image would boot up as a virtual machine. It sounds complicated, but it required only a few mouse clicks.
To try out this feature, I opened VMware Workstation, clicked on "Open an Existing VM," and selected a ShadowProtect image of a bootable drive from the backups stored on my network-attached storage device. VMware took less than a minute to create all the additional files needed to launch the image as a virtual machine, displayed a few unimportant warning messages, and booted the image file.
Other features I like in ShadowProtect Desktop include an Image Management tool that lets me split a large image into smaller files to simplify file transfer and that lets me combine a full backup and a sequence of incremental backups into a single file that reflects the state of my system on the date of the last incremental backup. This kind of fine-tuning isn't available on rival products.
The product isn't absolutely perfect—for example, you can't carry out every task from the keyboard: I had to use the mouse to click on the filename the software suggested for a backup image before the program would let me rename it. Also, the utility tends to be conservative in estimating the time needed to complete a backup: It told me that a backup to DVD would take 2 hours and then completed the task in 15 minutes. But those were the worst faults I could find.
What matters to me most is that the software is fast, reliable, and—for even moderately experienced users—almost effortless. The support forum at StorageCraft's Web site reports impressively few problems, and a StorageCraft engineer always responds within a few hours with either a way to fix a problem or with a promise to get it fixed in the next update. ShadowProtect makes me feel more secure about my system than I ever did before. I wouldn't run my computers without it, and I think you shouldn't either.
More Backup Software Reviews:
posted by Triniman @ 11:07 PM
<< Home