Acronis Backup and Recovery-Handy Tool for System Administrators

http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/29132

In any network and system environment, backup and recovery is one of the most crucial , critical and inevitably important and demanding phenomenon and there are two product (Norton Ghost & Acronis True Image)top of the line struggling to ease their intended user for as much granularity and flexibility. Reliable and rapid recovery is one of the system administrators’ urge in deployed domains.

I had used Norton Ghost v.9 quite for sometimes and the sole purpose for usage was domain client pc’s restoration in case of HDD failure caused by malfunction, viral activity or any other reason for system drive corruption. Though both Ghost and Acronis provide excellent recovery from scratch for partition to full HDD and Logical Volumes backup and restore for almost all Microsoft operating systems (MS Small Business Server, MS Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 and downstream to Windows Xp), moreover both support for Linux flavors like Ubuntu, Fedora and RHEL 6.

As a regular user of Acronis True image now for my windows domain which consist of 74 nodes, with identical hardware and software considerations I found the Acronis true image as an best solution from desktop level backup & recovery to HDD cloning of Domain Controller with Windows 2003 R2 64 bit operating system on it without any limitation faced so far. I found Acronis to be the best solution for following salient reasons:

1. Acronis UI is simple and easy to understand for novice user as well advance user all focused on one page.

2. True image is providing far more granular facilities like file and folder to partition and logical volumes backup and recovery.

3. Acronis don’t require .Net frame work as most of the backup & recovery software do.

4. Acronis provide Dual OS boot compatibility as compared to Norton Ghost and NovaStor Backup.

5. Acronis provided unlimited number of backups and doesn’t limit like other software.

6. Network Drive backup is also supported for backup through Acronis True Image.

7. Image size of Acronis is less than image created from Norton Ghost.

8. Acronis keep all its incremental and full backups in Acronis Secure Zone which is in accessible by malware, user interventions or any corruption of the image for backup. Secure zone is a propriety partition which is referred as ASZ only accessible by Acronis Backup and Recovery.

9. Recovery disk can be created on almost any type of portable device i.e. USB memory stick, external HDD, Zip drive etc.

Possible Cons:

Help Support is far less than Norton Ghost who improved their support through remarkable follow-ups of the problems faced by their users.

Domain Controller HDD image created through Acronis might get you problems like rejoining of the client pc to domain again, not that reliable in case of Active directory partition recovery.