Best IBM Backup Program

[Katie Wasserman]

(11-21-2014 02:18 PM)John W Kercheval Wrote:  What do you use to image? Which program? How well does it work?

I've been using Acronis True Image since it first came out (10+ years ago?) on all my machines and recommend it to all my clients (I'm a computer consultant). Personally, I have it set up to daily daily full images (you can also set it for differential images) to an attached NAS and/or USB drive and archive these (automatically for a trailing month or more). It's blindingly fast, almost too fast to believe it's workink. Imaging 60 GB to a USB 3.0 connected hard drive takes about 8 minutes (including verifying the image).

You can, of course, restore the entire disc image to a new (or your current) hard drive (or SSD) but the main way I use it for restoring is to "mount" the image as a temporary drive and then simply copy files as needed.

It's amazingly flexible and has many operation s for backup recovery and cloning disks. I've never had it fail to restore an image, but always verify the images after they are made -- very occasionally (well less than 1% of the time) it will make a bad image but you can set it to auto verify its image after making it. When you don't have a working opsys to boot from you boot from a USB drive or CD/DVD that you've make beforehand with a tool that's built into the program for that purpose.

My only gripe with with this program is that they change the UI with every version and they release versions every year. They are all backward compatible but it's a pain to learn a new UI each time.