I know everyone loves Acronis, but I’m done with it. I have issues with it because I don’t like the backup options it gives, and the #@!@# thing has caused blue screens at startup at least twice now, and there is nothing I hate more than blue screens at startup.
I am not at all opposed to spend money on it. In fact, I would prefer to pay for name-brand highly tested backup software. My computer is my work, and I absolutely need it to be functional and safe and all that. And having worked a long time in the storage software realm, I know that just because I have software that backs up fine, it also needs to restore, and that gets tested in the real world waaaaay less often than the backup. So paying for something that works is just fine by me.
I use rsync on all my boxes (windows, linux, mac).
It’s free
It’s fast (only copies the stuff that changed)
The copy is entirely unencrypted and in exactly the same format as the original. Thus restore can be as simple as drag/dropping it all back to where you want it.
Works over local connections and remote servers.
I’ve also noticed that several commercial packages are just fancy wrappers for rsync.
Cons: configuration isn’t hard, but isn’t point-and-click easy either. However, once you get it set up, you’re good to go.
Because it’s not really enough. I need something that will create multiple backups on multiple drives so I have a couple week’s worth. From what I can see the Window backup just does one backup, on one drive, and doesn’t save the old image. Not nearly secure enough for me.
Syncback from 2brightsparks.com is an awesome backup software. I use it to back up 37 machines nightly, and it runs flawlessly. I heartily recommend it.
I need something that will just run every night without me having to do anything, because I know from past experience that I will not do it if I have to remember to.
I’ve been using cwRsync on the windows side at home and the office. It’s pretty much a barebones rsync warp. I set a timed event (cron job, or I think windows calls them scheduled tasks) to run them once a day though half the time I just run them by hand. I don’t have the scripts on me but I can grab the data from one if anyone is interested.
I run a few local-local, some server-local, and some server-server. I’m extremely paranoid about data loss
At my office, we’ve had a single machine that reacts badly to Acronis (blue screens and crashes when pushing an image). We’ve never diagnosed the problem exactly, but our working theory is the machine had a flaky bit of hardware in it that only randomly manifested itself. It’s an older out of warranty Dell so we’ve never spent the time/money to figure out its problem, we just retired it.
(So it might just be the box you are trying to back up and not Acronis!)
