Complete disaster recovery (restore from "bare metal"; formatting and restoring) has been a thorn since Windows XP. In fact it's been downright weird which reminds me of:When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. hompson

It's fair to say that a Hunter S. Thompson quote about bare metal recovery and backup and restore has been as weird as my quest and I'm not sure why I thought of the relationship but perhaps thinking about "what a long strange trip it's been" kicked in some random brain cells still firing from the 70's. But anyway it's been a long strange trip and finding the perfect solution after much weirdness I feel like a pro.

Firstly a bit of background. I've historically been a huge fan of tape backup. You can take a copy off-site and yeah, it's slow, but a 4mm tape fits nicely in a safe deposit box or a neighbors drawer and hard drives (and the bays to keep them in) were expensive.

Things change. Multi-drive systems abound and in fact the box I used for my test has six hot swap drives. Other things change as well. The tape backup software I used for years; Seagate's BackUp Exec had a wonderful floppy boot method that allowed you to go to DOS, format drives, do all sorts of stuff, load the tape restore program in DOS and bang, you were back in business (albeit after about two hours of restore time). Seagate also had a wonderful scheduling program that would do an  unattended backup. My second rule of backup (the first rule is that it's got to work) is that it has to be easy as if it's not a backup isn't going to happen. Sadly Backup Exec, after being sold to Veritas and then sold to Symantec has been discontinued. The discontinued BackUp Exec doesn't work with XP,  and their alternatives are far, far beyond my financial scope, it appears that they're now focusing on the Corporate/Enterprise market.

So I looked around and found a bunch of promising disk backup possibilities. The aforementioned financial scope precluded me from trying them all so I shifted through them and settled on a test of Symantec's Ghost, Acronis True Image and Image for Windows.

Basically all of these guys allow you to create a disk image on another drive or CD/DVD and, in the event of a disaster, boot from their CD-ROM and restore. Should be faster and easier than tape, right?

I started out using a big box for testing; six RAID drives using a Perc controller (neither using RAID-0 or RAID-5), 2 3Ghz processors and Windows XP.

Ghost - Scary Stuff

Symantec clearly warns you to test the recovery CD-ROM and even if they didn't it'd be one of the first things you'd want to do anyway. If you can't boot the recovery disk it doesn't matter if you have a backup if you can't get to it.

So the Ghost recovery disk goes in the CD-ROM drive and I boot. It's not unlike installing Windows, you're prompted to install any special drivers which I did for the Perc controller. Things chugged along for a bit and then the blue screen of death (actually the first time I've seen the BSoD in XP). Tried it again and didn't installed the Perc drivers. Another BSoD, just different text.

I could make backups with no problem in Windows, I just couldn't boot the restore disk and you can't restore from Windows. Ouch. Created a long, detailed report on the Symantec web site with full text of error messages, hardware details, OS details, the whole nine yards. I received a confirmation that I'd get a reply in 24 hours.

Five days later no reply. I query them. They want me to use their live support chat feature complete with a link that returns a page not found. No way could I detail all the content from the BSoD even if I could get to the page. I replied by email.

They acquiesced to helping me by email. They pretty much suggested doing what I've been trying (loading the drivers) and then they slip one in on me; it only works with RAID-0 and RAID-5. Curious, there's no mention of that in the Ghost 9.0 requirements page. My reply was that gee, "how was I supposed to know that" and "I'm not going to change my RAID configuration to use this, how about a refund" didn't get anywhere; I'd have to talk to another department about that.

Can't use it (Ghost) in the Windows 2003 box (W2003 isn't supported) so punt and use it in the Sony Digital Studio P Media Center box, which I've left stock out of the box with no "funny" software or hardware. Slip in the CD, click on the install button and....ten minutes later the CD is still spinning and locked up so bad that ctrl-alt-del won't even bring up task manager.

While Ghost might work well in your environment it miserably failed my first requirement; that it actually work.

True Image - Slick & Functional

The True Image recovery CD-ROM can be created from the program itself or at install time. I choose the latter and it didn't even ask me about special drivers. I presume that it pulled them in from my configuration. Very slick. Booted it and no problem. Went to restore the image and wow, it worked.

There is one limit that I found with True Image, it does not support "dynamic" drives. If you have drives set up as dynamic True Image will not create an image of them. Otherwise it handled everything that I could throw at them and never even burped.

Restoring a single or a couple of files from the True Image backup was a bit more time consuming than Ghost. You had to "restore" the image backup to a temporary location and then select and copy the files from that temporary location. With Ghost you simply displayed the image, expanded it in an Explorer type interface and pick and copy the files you needed. A very small matter to be sure, but True Image worked so flawlessly I was scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a drawback.

I can't speak to the quality of Acronis support as I didn't need o ask them since everything worked as advertised. I suspect you'd not need to contact them but If it's anywhere near as good as their product it'll be top notch.

Image for Windows - Small, Fast and Effective

Image for Windows is a lean, mean backup and restore machine. It's small and fast (I presume it's written in a low level language) and has a somewhat "less slick" look to the interface. Not that the process doesn't offer options or functionality, they're simply devoid of the graphics found in the other two programs.

Of course this cuts down on the size of the program to the point that the restore program (the Image for DOS version which comes with the package) can fit on a floppy diskette (which comforts me as I still find diskettes to be more reliable than CD-ROM). Oh, you can create a boot diskette on CD-ROM for the Windows version if that's your preference.

The option for boot disk is only necessary if you keep a drive image on another drive; if you create your drive image on CD-ROM you need only boot that CD-ROM to restore it.

Restoring the drive (the C: boot drive) via the boot floppy was fast and easy. I only had to point to the image file, hit enter and it was automatic from there on out.

The restored image was perfect, nary a glitch. A very well crafted program. I exchanged a few emails with questions about how Image worked with the author of Image for Windows. He was prompt and as the actual author of the software as opposed to a script reader, knew what he was talking about.

Bottom Line

By far Image for Windows worked without fail, was faster and had more recovery boot options (diskette or CD-ROM). It preformed flawlessly. It is not as "slick" in terms of graphics vs. True Image but graphics add to the size of the file and getting a program to work from a floppy boot disk was a great feature. Image for Windows was also the least expensive.

True Image was slick. The full Acronis restore CD booted in about half the time it took me to get to the BSoD in Ghost. Restoring with True Image was indeed as simple as can be, just a couple of clicks.

In extra features both True Image and Ghosts have features that Image for Windows doesn't; Ghost does have the Symantec Live Update feature for patches and with True Image and Image for Windows you have to log on to the their respective web sites and check manually (gasp!). Frankly the Symantec "live update" stuff takes up too much disk space for my tastes and it is just another of scads of resident programs chewing up cycles and memory and I can do without that.

Nor does Image for Windows do incremental backups as do the other programs but I don't use that feature anyway. I'd much rather have an entire data set. Disk space is cheap and the backup is so fast that it's not a bother.

Image for Windows costs $26.98 and you can download the 3.6Mb 30 day evaluation here . Acronis True Image is listed at $49.99 and a limited (you can't restore) 15 day 37Mb trail can be downloaded here, Ghost is listed at $69.95 on their site as a buy only product.

By far, and not only because of the fact that I can't actually recover with Ghost and the size and price of True Image I'm going with Image for Windows. Overall it has the "feel" of a better crafted program and I'm impressed. Terrabyte has a lot of confidence in their product providing a full "try before you buy" version that is fully functional (30 day limit) and will allow you to fully test it on your system and will give you a good idea of how it'll work in terms of backing up your stuff and working with your particular hardware and software. Sadly there's no trial version of Ghost, I had to pay to find out it didn't work on my boxes.

Check out Image for Windows, think you'll be impressed and will give you a solid way to avoid the disk disaster blues.