Yes, Acronis is licensed per server, but we've found it to be a good investment. We protect over 40 servers with it here, plus I have their Workstation product on my computers at home. Their Universal Restore Option has made disaster recovery restores a snap. The product produces a "TIB" file, their own image format. To do a bare metal restore, you create a bootable CD ahead of time and set it aside; we probably have a half dozen in our DR emergency box. This is their own Linux distro, with which we've only ever once had driver issues. Our NICs and disk/RAID controllers are very mainstream though - HP/Compaq and Dell. One of the features we like is that we can mount these TIB files as R/O or R/W drives and pick files off them without having to do a full bare-metal restore. We also use it instead of VMware's P2V product for moving a system from physical to virtual. The now have a new product specifically intending for the P2V process, but we haven't tried that out yet.
We've found support to be very good when we've asked for it. That's all been done out of Russia, but their English was very good, and the techs were always willing to stay with an issue until it was resolved. The time we needed a newer driver than was in their current build, it only took them a couple of hours to post what I needed. If you want to test, I believe they have a 30-day trial that's full featured. Once the trial period is over, you cannot create more images, but you can still restore from images created during the trial period. - Philip This communication, including attachments, is for the exclusive use of addressee and may contain proprietary, confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, copying, disclosure, dissemination or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this communication and destroy all copies. From: Steve Kelsay [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 7:04 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Image Software - what's new this year? Does Acronis actually make image files, or is it similar to a backup system? It looks like it is licensed on a per machine basis. That would make it pretty expensive for an image tool where Ghost is just a single license for the disk we are using. Is that the case? From: Martin Blackstone [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 9:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Image Software - what's new this year? I really like Acronis True Image. Works like a charm and no DOS stuff to mess with. From: Steve Kelsay [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 6:44 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Image Software - what's new this year? It has been a while since I saw anything on imaging software. I am moving from an old version of Ghost (7) and was wondering what the latest greatest tool is for creating and burning images to workstations? We are getting in machines that have NICS do not support DOS, so booting to dos as the old GHOST required then connecting to a server to burn an image is not longer an option. Alternatively, I would like to burn a boot DVD with the image on board, but that is not as easy as it sounds. Anyone have an ISO they would like to share as an example? ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
