Ghost 10 or Acronis 2009

[Coach17]

My friend is going to mirror my current WD 120GB hard drive over to a Seagate 500GB drive. He has both Ghost 10 and Acronis 2009. From what he has read, Ghost 10 is not as good as Acronis. I am looking for opinions on what you have had better luck with.
I have Windows XP Home SP3
My current 120GB drive is about half full so when it gets to the 500GB drive I will have plenty of space.
Thanks for your help.

[Welshjim]

Coach17--I had an earlier version of Ghost (I think 8). It had several idiosyncrasies that needed some high powered help (Radified Community Forums) to fix/explain. I switched to Acronis True Image 11 Home and now to Acronis 2009. I have had few problems. And the Acronis Users Guide is very comprehensive.

[Coach17]

Thanks for the reply Jim. So Acronis appears to have one vote of confidence. Let's see what others have to say.

[fink]

Acronis. Used it for a few years with no problems. Has more and better features than ghost and is generally quicker to do it's job as well.

Acronis allows backups of files and folders, you can append to existing images and you can(should) create a boot disk that allows restorations and backups from a non-bootable PC. Acronis will also allow you to boot into a pre windows DOS-like environment by pressing an "F" key when windows is totally hosed to run a restore. It also has a sandbox feature that allows you to test software in a totally safe, isolated invironment. No contest, really.

[Midknyte]

Ghost 8 and 10 are two completely different animals. Ghost 9 and up are mutations of DriveImage by PowerQuest.

Acronis TI is a better product that Ghost IMO. Ghost requires .NET. It feels slower than TI when doing backups and restores. Even booting the rescue disc seems to take longer in Ghost.

Paragon has a decent freeware backup, but it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Acronis TI does. But it's free. Seagate Discwizard is based on an older version of Acronis TI, so that's worth a look too.
http://www.drive-backup.com/

[Coach17]

Thanks for the reply and it is another vote for Acronis. Just want to check on this. After we mirror my entire hard drive to the new one everything should work with the new drive. Am I correct? We are mirroring the whole drive, Windows and all Programs.

[Midknyte]

The term would be "cloning" not "mirroring", but I understand what you are getting at. Mirroring would indicate RAID1. You might also see the term "imaging" since you can take snapshot images of your drive, OS/Apps/Data.

You would clone the old drive to the new drive, then you'd have to set the new drive as your primary.

[Coach17]

So it appears that everything should be fine after the swtch over. We have another vote for Acronis.

[fink]

You would clone the old drive to the new drive, then you'd have to set the new drive as your primary

I've done this a half dozen times with no issues at all (so long as it's the same computer of course).

[dneilson]

And yet another vote for Acronis--much easier and quicker to use, runs right from Windows.and is very reliable. Been running it for a long time with no problems at all--would never go back to Ghost.

[Coach17]

Thanks for all the replies. Acronis will be the one. Hopefully there will be other replies.
Any idea on how long it should take to transfer a 120gb drive that has 63 gb used up?
After the weekend when this is done I will reply with the results.

[dneilson]

The transfer will be somewhat dependent on the DMA capability of your drives. One of my drives runs at DMA 6 and the other at DMA 5 and I transfer 60gb in about 23 minutes.

[Coach17]

At least gives me an idea of how long it should take. I am not familiar with DMA. I assume my friend does.

[dneilson]

If you're curioous about the DMA of your drives Google the drive PN and it will be listed in the Specs.

[Coach17]

Thanks, I will get my book out for the drive to see if I can find the PN.