Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I heart Acronis True Image Echo Workstation

On the recommendation of another tech, I have been using this product. Any computer that comes back to the workshop gets imaged to a 500Gb drive on my workshop computer. This means that I can play with the computer to my hearts content knowing that I have an image to restore. With Acronis I put a CD into a drive and get it to backup over the network. No removing harddrives, no mucking around with USB drives.
Better still, from my workshop computer I can mount the image as a drive and check for faults or load the registry hive on the workshop computers registry to check for issues. Any changes you make are saved as sessions.
So pop the disk back in and restore the image and you have a working computer.
The other neat feature is the universal restore. Often when we change a motherboard, we also need to run a repair restore on the computer and then restore the 94 odd updates and even then we may run into problems with the computer. The universal restore replaces the HAL with the appropriate one for the chipset of the new motherboard and hard drive. So you end up with a working version of the system. You will probably still need to run the drivers for the other hardware (video, audio) if you didn't give Acronis access to the drivers earlier.

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