7 replies to this topic

[fblittle]

<sub>I Just listened to Podcast #68, where PCDoc talked about Acronis 2012. I just want to add my 2 cents worth here.

First let me say that I do not work for or have any affiliation with Paragon, so I have no reason to perfer it over any other software.

Although Acronis is a good product I have had much better luck with the Paragon software. I recently did a study for the company I work for about backup software products so I tried all that were not enterprise solutions. Our company produces equipment that are PC controlled and these systems with our own software have a very complicated configuration that requires a huge amount of time to set up properly (as in Weeks, not hours) so having a good backup solution is extremely important. When doing the testing I found that Acronis failed at scheduled, and non-scheduled, network backups more frequently than it succeded. I am not sure why, but Acronis was my first procuct of choice so I was really dissapointed that it failed so frequently. Paragon however almost never fails. This being the case we proceeded to test Paragon to make sure that it was compatible with our software. No Problem!

Reasons Why I chose Paragon over Acronis:

1. Reliability
2. Help they offered.
3. Selection of products. Hard Drive Manager 11 is the best.
4. Options that Acronis offered for a price were included with Paragon, Like "Restore to Dissimilar Equipment", and RAID support, Win PE Recovery (Windows Pre-Install Enviornment).
5. More Tools for Geeks like us. Hard Drive Manager can do many things with the hard drive. Re-partition on the fly, Clone, Wipe the drive, Defrag, make VMDs (virtual Disks), as in Physical to Virtual, Virtual Adjust (so that it will make sure that it will work on the VM software that you are using). It can Clone from any size Drive to any size Drive, it doesn't have to be larger, it can be smaller as long as the data fits, Win PE recovery enviornment(Windows Pre-install Enviornment).
6.Trial Software proved its Superiority for me.
7. Last but not least Price. Paragon is cheaper than Acronis by a good margin. Also if you want all the extras that Arconis offeres that can double your cost. With Paragon it is all included. Hard Drive Manager Pro is kind of expensive, but they offer other products line Hard Drive Manager Suite that is about 1/2 the price, and does almost all the things that Pro does. They have a comparison on their web site that you can use to compare. Also you can find Backup and Restore Home version for around $20 depending on if you can find it on sale or not and "Restore to Dissimilar Equipment" is still included.

Give it a look and try.</sub>

Edited by fblittle, 12 December 2011 - 01:39 PM.

[krom]

Great Info. Thanks for the post as it's always good to have options.

[timekills]

Well, maybe you should work for Paragon. You've sold me on at least trying it out.

[pcdoc]

<sub>I Just listened to Podcast #68, where PCDoc talked about Acronis 2012. I just want to add my 2 cents worth here.

First let me say that I do not work for or have any affiliation with Paragon, so I have no reason to perfer it over any other software.

Although Acronis is a good product I have had much better luck with the Paragon software. I recently did a study for the company I work for about backup software products so I tried all that were not enterprise solutions. Our company produces equipment that are PC controlled and these systems with our own software have a very complicated configuration that requires a huge amount of time to set up properly (as in Weeks, not hours) so having a good backup solution is extremely important. When doing the testing I found that Acronis failed at scheduled, and non-scheduled, network backups more frequently than it succeded. I am not sure why, but Acronis was my first procuct of choice so I was really dissapointed that it failed so frequently. Paragon however almost never fails. This being the case we proceeded to test Paragon to make sure that it was compatible with our software. No Problem!

Reasons Why I chose Paragon over Acronis:

1. Reliability
2. Help they offered.
3. Selection of products. Hard Drive Manager 11 is the best.
4. Options that Acronis offered for a price were included with Paragon, Like "Restore to Dissimilar Equipment", and RAID support, Win PE Recovery (Windows Pre-Install Enviornment).
5. More Tools for Geeks like us. Hard Drive Manager can do many things with the hard drive. Re-partition on the fly, Clone, Wipe the drive, Defrag, make VMDs (virtual Disks), as in Physical to Virtual, Virtual Adjust (so that it will make sure that it will work on the VM software that you are using). It can Clone from any size Drive to any size Drive, it doesn't have to be larger, it can be smaller as long as the data fits, Win PE recovery enviornment(Windows Pre-install Enviornment).
6.Trial Software proved its Superiority for me.
7. Last but not least Price. Paragon is cheaper than Acronis by a good margin. Also if you want all the extras that Arconis offeres that can double your cost. With Paragon it is all included. Hard Drive Manager Pro is kind of expensive, but they offer other products line Hard Drive Manager Suite that is about 1/2 the price, and does almost all the things that Pro does. They have a comparison on their web site that you can use to compare. Also you can find Backup and Restore Home version for around $20 depending on if you can find it on sale or not and "Restore to Dissimilar Equipment" is still included.

Give it a look and try.</sub>

Very nice write up. Although I have not seen the reliability concerns you have, I certainly will try download and try this. With discount pricing they are actually both about the same as Amazon sells Acronis for $19. I certainly love to try new software so I will try this and do my own comparison based on different needs. You are obviously on a larger scale than I am which says something. Thanks for the detailed write up and will update with my own thoughts so we can compare notes. After all it is about ease of use and value. Thanks for the post.

[pcdoc]

Update. I downloaded and installed the paragon software. After running a few gyrations with it I can say I am overall impressed and I think as fblittle stated, that it is a very solid piece of software. I will say that based on running both, you should try the trial version of both before deciding. I found they approach things very differently. For starters, partial selection of a drive is more straight forward in Acronis. As long as you know what Disk ID is (careful as it is not drive letter) the backup wizard in Paragon is easy which prevents you from getting into too much trouble, and it is very fast. The backup of my OS drive took about 4 mins to backup. Pretty impressive. My first impression is that either of these will work better at a quick recovery over WHS but they are different enough that it will be a personal choice to a large degree. Both have their strengths but they are different. Try them both and see which better suites your particular needs. Definitely a nice find and again thanks to fblittle for pointing it out. I will continue to play more with Paragon and see how I like in the next couple of weeks.

[fblittle]

PCDOC, Thanks for the kind words. I am not sure why I experienced the reliability issues, maybe a fluke, but I experienced it at work and at home in different situations. What happened is that Acronis could not find the network path and folder so it gave up on the backup more than 1/2 the time, at first I thought it was my WHS2011 but it did it at one place where I work at on a *.gov network as well. Maybe not conclusive, but that was my experience. However, I installed Paragon on the same machine and backed up to the same network folder and it completed the full as well as differential backups everytime. By contrast, I also used Ghost and it did completed all the backups, but failed frequently on the restore. What good is a Backup image if you can't rely on the restore being good?

After My Post I realized that I didn't mention the restore function. For Backup and Recovery software, Recovery is probably even more important than Backup for obvious reasons, if you can't recover there is no need to Backup. So Recovery is worth a mention.

Paragon uses Archive files for the sector based images. They start with arc_******.PBF the archive is automatically named with a date and time code which can be altered to what ever you want before the backup is started. When the archive is finished it is recorded in the UI under the Archive tab as a archive file so that it can be selected for a recovery or it can be used to create a differential of incremental backup using the full disk archive as a base archive to start from. You can exclued any files you want in the Exclued settings and comperss the archive as well. I have used the most aggressive compression and it doesn't add that much time to the backup, especially if it is backing up at nite while your asleep, but it can save you a lot of space.

Paragon provides a second file with the download that will make a DVD boot disk to recover your machine with, in fact they provide two different methods to recover with the WinPE disk is made with the file they provide with the download, the second is made from the UI and is not a Win PE recovery disk, this disk is based on Linux, but works as also but with less features.

When your hard disk fails you can just replace the drive and run the Win PE recovery disk that you made. You can make this disk at any time even after your hard disk fails. When you boot with this disk it is like installing windows, you get the "Starting Windows" screen, then it transitions into the Paragon UI, it works and looks just like the desktop version, so it is easy to use if you are used to the desktop version. There is a restore Wizard that you use to recover with, it is just as easy as the "Smart Backup" Wizard, but in reverse. Recovery takes only a few minutes from a network, USB, or second disk(SATA Port), archive.

The reason I like Paragon for recovery better is the "Adaptive Restore" tool That means you can either recover your system with a new disk, or you can install your system on a new PC and Adaptive Restore will find the drivers for your new PC so that you can boot the Old OS on the new PC. You may need to replace some drivers later to optomize things, or install drivers non-essential for booting later, but you can boot into your old PC enviornment on your new PC.

This function is really important for us at work because the customer may have an old PC that dies or becomes outdated. We can take that backup archive and install it to a new PC even if the drives were of a different type. This can save hours of work. Acronis has this function as well, but most people don't have it because it is an add on called "Plus Pack" and is an additional $20 or so. I haven't used the Acronis version, but I am sure that it works as well. Of course Paragon claims that for some reason that theirs works better. I think it's because of their Virtual adjust technology.

The last feature that I want to mention for a few people here that run virtual machines is a feature that other products may have as well called P2V and V2P and V2V and P2P and OS to SSD. V = Virtual, and P = Physical, so you can backup your OS to a VMD and run it on your Virtual Machine for testing. You can store your Physical machine in a Virtual Disk and recover from it, or run it on your VM and restore it later.

There are so many features to this software the they can't all be mentioned here or you would fall asleep before your were done reading, Maybe you already have? I will if I don't quit now.

Edited by fblittle, 13 December 2011 - 05:40 AM.

[ikon]

great info fblittle, thanks for taking the time to inform all of us.

[lisjachij]

Hey guys, both software are good, the question arise when it comes to errors and how they are fixed by support... this comparison may help