Opinions about backup software

[guessoso]

Windows 7 64 bit OS. Windows backup sucks. I need to get something else.

I have 2011 Acronis Home. This software sucked too. The backups worked fine. However, when I needed to boot up off of the Acronis Disk and then do a recovery I found that the base 2011 CD did not come with enough drivers to even run my mouse. I had to spend alot of time on the Acronis forums to figure this out. It did not have enough drivers to do the recovery.

When they advertise the base version they say you can do a recovery to the same hardware (which I did ), but it turns out you really need to buy the 'plus pack' to have enough drivers to do any kind of recovery. This was on a windows XP machine. I have since upgraded.

I was pretty ticked. At the time the plus pack was another $50. I felt like they were ripping me off.

Now they bundle the plus back with the home version and I can upgrade to 2013 for $25.

Is acronis reliable? I don't need anything fancy. I want the following:
1. image backup as a baseline of an SSD windows 7 base install.
2. incremental backups run automatically. Continous backup is not necessary. just once/day.
3. Backup to 2 locations. One an internal RAID disk and one an external drive.
4. need a 2nd backup. I have an internal RAID disk that also has software installed on it. I need this backed up internally. It is is the same internal disk that gets my SSD backups.

So basically I need to do 1 incremental backup to 2 locations. Then another incremental backup (from a different disk) to 2 different locations.

Yeah I like my backups. This is not real fancy. Just multiple copies from different disks. Have had issues with losing data before. It doesn't happen often but it sucks. So I like multiple backups.

Is acronis home 2013 with the plus pack sufficient for this? anythng else I should try. I don't want to spend massive amounts of money.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I've used acronis 2009, 20011, and 2013 all with no problems. I didn't have the plus pack for 2009 or 20011 and they always worked fine too. You should have used the free trial to make sure the recovery disk would work for you. I've never had a problem with the recovery disks, even when I had a bootable raid array. The newest version of acronis will do everything you want. In fact, the 2011 version should also do everything you want.

For 1 & 2, you need to scheduale seperate backups, one for the image and one for the incremental. For 3, just create a one line batch/script file with a copy command in it. The when you create the acronis schedule it will allow you to use a "post" program. List your copy script in there. I use something similar to automatically rename my backups something more useful. for 4, creat a 3rd backup schedule.