Best IBM Backup Program

[John W Kercheval]

Can anyone rec a GREAT backup program for IBMs? My first pc was the portable plus in 1984 and I have NEVER successfully restored a pc after a crash. I've tried many things!

The MacIntosh Time Machine is really effective but my IBMs never come back. I have to start from scratch.

Right now my IBM Machine is an $8K General Dynamics GD8200. With an SSD which I consider not too reliable.

All ideas appreciated! Thank you.

[Sylvain Cote]

(11-21-2014 11:48 AM)John W Kercheval Wrote:  All ideas appreciated! Thank you.

You could try Paragon Backup & Recovery 2014 Free Edition
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

I have not used this particular software but I have used successfully
their NFTS, HFS+, ExtFS drivers for OS X and Windows.

For OS X, I use Time Machine for hourly backup and Carbon Copy Cloner
for daily partition cloning, it has saved me several time in the past.

Sylvain

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Even the spinning disks used in laptops don't seem to be really reliable, and my I work at home and am dependant on my laptop, so what I do is I keep a spare imaged disk ready to go. My situation is probably different than your in that I do not have a constant stream of new data, and most of of the data that resides on my laptop is easily restored . There are two programs that I have used to make image copies of my disk one is the commercial program Acronis True Image and the other is the free Clonezilla Live. Both of these work well and get the job done. I find that image copy is the quickest way to recover and restoring data is usually less of a problem than restoring the OS and applications.

[John W Kercheval]

What do you use to image? Which program? How well does it work?

[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.

[John W Kercheval]

Acronis is by far the worst. it failed on 100% of our systems 100% of the time.

[Mark Hardman]

(11-21-2014 06:51 PM)John W Kercheval Wrote:  Acronis is by far the worst. it failed on 100% of our systems 100% of the time.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I've used Acronis for over a decade now. I have licenses for each family member's laptop and my desktops at work. I perform a scheduled, rotating full backup on each machine to my Synology Diskstation DS411 or locally attached USB drives. The Diskstation in turn is RAID protected and backed up weekly to a second non-RAID NAS.

Over the years I've performed a dozen recoveries from Acronis .TIBs and have never lost a single byte of data.

[Katie Wasserman]

Apparently everyone doesn't have the same experiences with this software.

But I personally, along with my clients, have used this to restore literally hundreds of drive images to new drives to replace older (or failed) ones and never had any issues (or lost data) when doing so.

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Likewise I have used Acronis to image drives from my machines and I have never had any issues creating or restoring the images.

[Thomas Radtke]

I'm also using Acronis, but taking an image fails each time I try to access the storage server via wlan, as if the price of being fast is no error correction, fast timeouts or something similar. About a hundred GB can be written before ATI comes back without meaningful error message. I read it also has problems with USB-hubs, maybe for the same reason.

[John W Kercheval]

Ok we bit the bullet & bought Acronis.

QUESTION: All of our drives are encrypted. Acronis can back them up as-is with no issues right? The Mac is encrypted with the internal file vault 2.

The Acronis License is for the Mac & PC. The Mac backup is just to support the Time Machine which works perfectly.

The PC is encrypted with PGP and is being backup up right now.

Again it is an encrypted drive. Does anyone have an Acronis citation that says this works?

Thanks. The acronis interface is great but it never worked before. Last time we tried it was at least 5 years ago.

[Katie Wasserman]

(11-22-2014 12:06 PM)John W Kercheval Wrote:  Again it is an encrypted drive. Does anyone have an Acronis citation that says this works?

I've never done that. However I do use virtual drive encryption with TrueCrypt and that works fine with Acronis, it sees that as just one big file in the underlying unencrypted NTFS.

[Mark Hardman]

(11-22-2014 12:06 PM)John W Kercheval Wrote:  Ok we bit the bullet & bought Acronis.

Again it is an encrypted drive. Does anyone have an Acronis citation that says this works?

The following article is from their support web site:

1649: Compatibility of Acronis Backup Software with Encryption Software

Key points in the article:

The following situations can occur:

• Acronis Backup software may fail to access an encrypted partition from Windows and thus will not back it up;
• Acronis Backup software may fail to resize an encrypted partition during restore;
• Acronis Backup software may back up an encrypted partition from Windows, but restoring such a partition will make it unencrypted. If an encrypted system partition is backed up and then restored, then the machine will become unbootable after the restore. This is only true when working in Windows;
• Some files may be missing in the backup.
  

The article goes on to suggest that even a forensic sector-by-sector backup may fail to restore.

[John W Kercheval]

Thanks I just checked that out. So this is a crapshoot right?

We cannot do a "test restore" because that could fail & we could blow out the machine.


Any ideas?

Can this Paragon pgm back up the encrypted drive?

John

[John W Kercheval]

Casoper will do it.

Will post an overall post soon.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(11-23-2014 11:41 AM)John W Kercheval Wrote:  Thanks I just checked that out. So this is a crapshoot right?

We cannot do a "test restore" because that could fail & we could blow out the machine.


Any ideas?

Can this Paragon pgm back up the encrypted drive?

John

A backup or image is NEVER complete without doing a test restore. Even if it means purchasing a new hard drive or using a second machine just for the purpose of doing the test restore.

The question is: How important is your work on the hard drive? If the restore failed would you be out of business, or just lose a lot of time recreating the work? The cost of a second hard drive for the purpose of testing a restore is usually minor compared to the cost of losing your work.

There are two parts to every backup scheme. The first being doing the backup. The second is the ability to know how to do a successful restore. Most backup schemes fail on the second part. Either the operator does not know how to do the restore, or he finds out that he wasn't really backing up what he thought he was. The time to learn how to do the restore is while the machine is still running - NOT after the machine has failed. It's too late then to learn what you should have already learned.

I remember many years ago, we were using our first Sun workstation at work. I was not comfortable that we were doing our backup correctly. We had a service company that had set up our system and I really didn't care too much for their attitude. So I told them that I planned to "crash" the machine and see what it would take to restore it back to working condition. There were horrified that I would do this. So Dave & I at work, stayed one weekend, "crashed" the system, and proceeded to learn how to do a complete restore. The end result was that the service company had set up the backup totally wrong. While Dave & I had a very stressful weekend, we learned a lot, and ended up setting up the backup/restore the correct way so that we could in-house bring the system back from a disaster. Oh - We also fired the service company and learned how to service our own systems.

I have never set up a backup scheme without ALSO doing a complete test of the restore. Otherwise I'm just kidding myself that what I'm doing will actually work. The time to learn that a restore will not work is NOT after the system has crashed. Then it is too late.

There's one more thing to consider. There are typically two types of disaster failures: hard drive or system board.

Since I'm not familiar with using encrypted drives, if a hard drive fails, can a new drive just be installed and the image restored and system is back working?

If a system board fails, can the encrypted hard drive be pulled and put in a new system and it still work?

Both of these failures should be tested. Or, as you so eloquently put it, "this is a crapshoot". And one that I would not wish to take.

Bill

[Katie Wasserman]

(11-23-2014 12:46 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  A backup or image is NEVER complete without doing a test restore. Even if it means purchasing a new hard drive or using a second machine just for the purpose of doing the test restore.

I completely agree with this. As much as I trust Acronis I would never restore to my only hard drive without having a known good image. The very first thing I do after configuring a new machine is to use a 2'nd main hard drive, backup and restore the image to it then boot from it and verify it's perfect. Then store the original drive in a fireproof box on site. It's both fast and cheap to do this and gives complete peace of mind that you can be back up in minutes if you main drive ever fails and back up in a day if your motherboard fails (you can always find the same PC you have -- often refurbished -- for next day delivery from any of a zillion on-line stores).

I'm nuts about backups.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

One more comment on backups.

Just because the image restored once does NOT mean that it will restore a second time. Everything will fail at some point including that hard drive that contains the backup image. And it will probably not give you any advance warning. I've had drives fail on the second restore attempt. It does happen.

The safe way is to have multiple images on multiple devices. Just depends on how critical this data is. Also should have copy off-site in a safe place.

Like Katie, I am also "nuts about backups."

Bill

[David Hayden]

Based on the recommendations here I bought Acronis True Image 2015 about 6 weeks ago. Today I uninstalled it. I had absolutely nothing but trouble with this software. Actually, I should say that today I *attempted* to uninstall it. I fully expect to have problems with removing it.

Looking at the Acronis forums, it appears that the 2015 version is bad. Some people are asking to downgrade to 2014. This might explain the mixed results.

If anyone wants it (PC version), I'll happily send you my serial number.

Dave

[BobVA]

You might have a look at Drive Snapshot

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/