Regarding Acronis disk imaging software:

I happily used and recommended Acronis for several years. I purchased it to use its scheduling function to do full backups from a small data server running Windows XP to different network drives on different nights of the week.

This worked reliably until about two years ago, apparently a Windows XP update broke the functionality. The software would begin the backup, get some percentage done, and then report a write failure and terminate the operation. Days and days of forum searches and attempts to fix the problem using suggestions on the forums failed to give me enough information to fix the problem. Furthermore, their own forum was rife with complaints about the issue, with extremely sparse canned responses from tech support, and sometimes outright snide responses from the company itself. There were reports of people buying upgrades to the latest version in their attempt to fix the issue, and failing.

In the meantime, I built another machine and programmed it to back up the hard drive using another method, but that method still didn’t give the multiple days of fall-back needed in case a corrupted database got saved onto the backup, writing over the last good copy before it was discovered. In other words, if you went home and came in the next morning to find your accounting database file corrupted, the corrupted file would be in the backup image too.

I revisited the issue a few months ago, only to discover that those who are unlucky enough to be afflicted with this problem still have no solution, and none promised, in fact no substantive response on the issue at all.

Rather than purchase the upgrade on the chance that it might work, and based on the overwhelming consensus about their tech support (apparently tech support is sympathetic but is kept away from engineering because they can’t get any better answers than you can) I went shopping.

I settled on Terabyte Image for DOS/Linux and Windows. It is not so much of a one-button solution and depending on your needs might require some reading of the fine manual, but it is capable of doing the things that the old version of Acronis did. The Windows version has a scheduler in it that allows me to write a backup to a different network drive on different days. It will allow me to do a bare-metal restore onto any replacement drive that is big enough to hold the archive, from an image stored on the network using a boot disk. The boot disks can boot any machine and use DOS or Linux to do back-up and restore to any attached drive. In my tests it was reliable (I’ve come this far by having disk failures and having two different backup solutions in years past fail to restore from the archive, now that is very frustrating).

Just a word to the wise. Using Acronis is like signing up for an ISP. If everything works for you, it’s great. If something doesn’t work, you’re in for a new kind of adventure. Always test extensively before you commit, keeping in mind the cost for loss of data.