Acronis vs. Ghost

Having used Ghost since the early days (when it was still made by the brilliant minds of Binary Research) I have been reluctant to change to another disk imaging solution. It's time to test the new (to me) horse in the race, Acronis True Image.

My current setup is using a ghostcast server to send and receive (create) desktop images. On the client side I have used two diskettes to boot to the network and start ghost, connect to the server and proceed either with image creation or image load. This process has worked well so far with a few caveats. Image corruption and finding drivers for obscure network cards (this would also exist with Acronis.)

My hope is that Acronis will be as simple to use as Ghost while eliminating the corruption issue.

Installation

Acronis offers a dizzying array of different versions AND names of disk imaging products. I settled on Acronis True Image Echo Workstation.

My first task was to create a Bootable Rescue Media CD. I included all the options; Safe and Full version of Acronis True Image Workstation (ATIW) as well as Acronis Bootable Agent. Funny glitch in the burning module of Acronis, the program would not recognize a blank CD-R, kept saying it wasn't blank. I slipped in a CD-RW and it finished creating the disk.

I was pleasantly suprised at how simple it was to create an image! The boot CD identified the disk AND it loaded drivers for the network card. I was able to browse the network and log in to my server with proper credentials. Very easy. I ran a test image and it worked great. I then did a test verify and that worked as well.

After creating a reference image of a production desktop PC, i used the boot CD to take that image.

Restoring the image to new PCs was just as simple, boot to the CD and restore.

Overall I am very pleased with Acronis. Faster, easier, more flexible add up to a winning combo. All that is left is pricing!