Hi!

I hope I'm in the right place to ask this. I use AOMEI Backupper Free software for imaging, recovering and clonning HDDs. Someone told me that their software doesn't work as it should and the the restored image of a drive will have worse performance becuase of the drivers weren't installed properly (o_O ?!?). And that I should buy professional/paid software, like Acronis True Image.

Could he be right or is he bullshitting me? I always tought that a clone is a clone and that a recovered image is a recovered image - no matter the program which did it. Could I be wrong and is he right?

Thank you!

I don't know AOMEI Backupper Free but as long as it does a sector-by-sector image/clone of the drive then the result should be the same as Acronis True Image...

If you are imaging/cloning a damaged drive then by all means you should use hardware assisted cloning tool to handle bad blocks, re-sets, etc ...

But on a GOOD drive then as long as your imaging software do a sector by sector image then you should be ok.

Try something like savepart. It's free and do what you want. An exact copy of the drive - http://www.partition-saving.com/

The only problem you might get is something like software protection that is locked to the serial number of the drive, etc .... but Acronis True Image will not help you out with that either.

If the drive is bad or dying you might want to try ddrescue or hddsuperclone instead.

If the drive is perfectly good just use savepart and you are done.

For imaging a drive with bad sectors i normaly do something like this - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 841#p10585

Regards.

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Here's a review of 20 drive imaging programs by Raymond CC. I have used Acronis True Image 2013 and AOMEI Backupper to back up my and my customers' hard drives for years and they are both excellent. My only complaint with AOMEI Backupper is its un-intuitive user interface. I found Acronis's 2016 user interface terrible and reverted to the 2013 version. You probably can't go wrong with any of the 20 programs in that review.

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Thanks for the info !!!

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I am not doing sector-by-sector exact clones or images. Could that be where AOMEI and Acronis could differ?

No, they both offer sector-by-sector imaging as an option. Normally, they are used to create compressed, data-only images. While they both have options to skip read errors, they will abort the process if the drive is really unstable.

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Yes, I don't use that feature (the exact sector-by-sector imaging). I create and recover data-only images of hard disk drives. So, can they differ? AOMEI and Acronis? Or is my friend bullshitting me? I'm not paying for Acronis if AOMEI offers the same for free (as I don't need the other features that Acronis offers).

I'm not understanding what you are saying but if you still have doubts then go get another drive that you can play with and restore your image/clone to it. Then replace the original drive with the clone and see it it works....

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Wondering if this is a terminology problem, data recovery v system (backup and) recovery.

from

whichever software you use:

Backup and recovery software will have options to restore files folders and systems, however, they must be made *before* any drive problems occur.
The options must also be set up to perform the recovery that you expect to require. ie Bare Metal backup, (entire bit by bit clone) or just user data such as My Documents and below.

Data recovery is distinctly different from system recovery in that it is only concerned with data, not an operational system.
The drive more often than not has already developed faults.
Clone the drive entirely and recover the data the client wants back. no OS included. Drivers won't matter at all.

If you are wanting to take a problematic drive out, copy the system (and data) to a new drive and plug it back in, you will encounter problems.
If there are bad data on the original problematic drive, those errors will be copied forwards too.
As previously mentioned, if there are bad sectors it may not even copy at all.

You cannot, with any confidence, do part system recoveries where you re install Windows and then superimpose the old file system over it in the hope that programs and drivers will still remain good.
They won't.

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Whatever software you use if you intend to have a copy/backup/image of the drive in a way that if you need to replace the entire drive the new restored one will work as the old one then you have to do a full sector-by-sector image/clone of the entire drive (or at least the os partition and the partitions you don't want to loose). That "image" might be "compressed" by some sort of propriatary image file format used by each diferent software but when un-compressed it should return the drive to the exact same state that it was (sector by sector) when you created the image.

This is diferent from using the software to backup data out of the drive, like documents and videos. If you just backup your data you still have to install windows and drivers if your old drive dies. If you have a full byte-byte image then you just restore that image file (or you a cloned drive) and you should be ok, unless the original drive already had problems when you imaged/cloned it.

If you use the options on the software to do a full drive image/clone then no matter what software you use as long as it doesn't have any bugs the restored image/clone should be identical, because it should be an exact copy of the drive on the moment you took the image. If this doesn't happen then your imaging software is not working as expected or your original drive is damaged (or the destination drive is damaged).

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I have used Aoemi Backupper and Acronis both without issues for PC backup and restore. The only issue I had with AOEMI is that it was supposed to be Windows server compatible but the scheduled backups did not work on Windows Server. They did however work for a PC.
That's why I use R-Drive Image from R-Tools, the developer of R-Studio. It works with PCs and Servers and it's less than $50. The image format is the same as R-Studio too.
IMO Acronis backup for Windows servers is way too much $.

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Thank you for all the replies. Let me clear things up.



That's what I'm talking about. Not data recovery off of a (damaged) drive. I'm talking about making an image of an entire HDD (Windows partition and anything else that's on that same drive). And then restoring it to another computer with the same hardware or the same computer that it was created off.

So AOMEI Backupper Standard (Free) should do the job fine, right? My friend says that the systems (computers) which HDD have the recovered image from another (same HW) computer won't perform optimally. I always tought that an image is an image, no matter the tool and that it should work exactly the same.

AOMEI offer an exact sector-by-sector imaging of a drive but I don't use that option. I guess that would image empty sectors as well, I don't do/need that.

So, is my friend right or wrong? Would we benefit from getting Acronis True Image? I don't think so, he does.

Again, thanx!

If you can create the full HDD image with AOMEI Backupper Standard (Free) and if when you restore that image the result that you get is an exact same drive as the one you have then i don't see how Acronis would made any diference, unless of course AOMEI Backupper have some sort of problem and doesn't restore the drive to an identical state of the original drive at imaging time, but of course that is not very likely. So if the compressed image file can be used to generate a new drive that is exactly the same (sector by sector) as the one you have on the image then you should be ok.

I don't use any of those. I do use either savepart or terabyte image for DOS if i need to use some imaging/cloning software that is not Hardware based. But nowadays i'm almost exclusively using HRT-DRE to image/clone.

Regards.

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Your friend is mostly wrong. Probably he heard someone talking about other aspects of the way those programs work, and misunderstood something.

Both programs will give the same result in the way you want to use them. You can also use Clonezilla, again with same results.

Thank you for the confirmation. My friend thinks he knows everything but he is wrong. I asked specifically on this forum because I know you are the HDD gurus. Thank you!

ISTM that you are contradicting yourself. AIUI, you are creating a "logical" backup of your file system rather than a "physical" backup. ISTM that not all tools would necessarily produce the same result, although the "images" would most probably be functionally identical.

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A "logical" backup of the file system would be diferent from a "physical" backup.

If a "physical" backup is made even if a specific tool compresses the result image file or use a propriatary format for it, like a PC3K image from DE then other apps will not be able to open/use that image but when restored to another drive the result should be an identical drive to the one that was imaged.

A "logical" backup of the file system will be diferent from tool to tool. If you use one tool to do a "logical" backup of the file system you might end up with a diferent result then you will have with another tool when restoring that backup.

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