I think it is very important for each individual to find/use whatever works best for him/her. I have used ATI Home since version 8, and I believe only 1 image ever failed to restore, that was probably my fault. I have found with some of the older versions I've had to rename a file or two to get it to work in Windows 8/8.1, all part of the game. Image on...
Simply true! In real, I'd most problems with the server versions!! And that's much more important to work correctly that on the PC! All important data are on File Server and that I'd change for security reason from Windows Server based to Linux Server. Was a good move by the way, much more secure and also much faster. And as I wrote above somewhere, Clonezilla was also failing with producing a non-recoverable HD Image of the server System HD! Acronis 9.7.x Echo Enterprise Server wasn't able to get installed on the Linux Debian Server and than I used the bootable HD-Clone for to imaging the Servers System HD and that just worked as on the PC. The only disadvantage is that I need to down the Server and boot from USB for to do the imaging which need app. 2h and for that time the Server is off line! There isn't an real Linux Version of HD-Clone available. With that I could just live and choose only the night time at weekend's for to do imaging!
Thanks all for sharing your experiences. Regarding HDClone - yes I tried it a few weeks ago on a Win8.1PE to backup an EXT4 partition. Although the backup appeared to be working, the imaging process was very slow and the image size was large, almost no compression although I selected high compression. There also appeared to be a bug when imaging a Linux EXT4 partition - it always showed the EXT4 partition as the location for image storage, although I selected a different disk to store the image. The actual image was still on the disk I selected but the wrong info displayed made me uncomfortable. So my experience with HDClone was not very positive, mainly because of the slow imaging and large image size. I will stick with Terabyte Image for Windows/Linux and Acronis for now. Yes I will give Active@ Disk Image a try once they solve the UEFI secure boot problems.
Great addition of info to your first post! For acronis, it's possible to do image explore. You can select restore, and select restore files and folders then you can browse your image to extract its contents without restoring the whole image. It's not very intuitive design by Acronis for this image explore feature.
I using to work with Server mainly because with my company we providing outsources services for LAN (Local Area Network) mainly using Linux Servers and IBM AS400 (the Dinosaur!). Compression of system images isn't secure for such work, we'd stop that quite some years ago. Maybe OK for private use depend on what security you need! On business side the highest level is the only one to use. And that for sure also reflect to the private systems we're using! Regarding HD-Clone, I never had such problem, except one time and that were not Software related, it were simply because of the problems with Kingston Memories. On Server side we always using ECC buffered memories. In my own private PC's I use Geil and Corsair and had used OCZ in the past (which were excellent unfortunate OCZ didn't produce Memory anymore). Tha's not ECC buffered memories, just normal. 3 day's ago I had to exchange on one of my own servers the system HDD (500GB Hitachi) because it stopped working and I used the latest Image for to restore (3 weeks old at that time). The Server had a total of 5 partitions: EXT2, EXT3 and EXT4 and the restore process went on without any problem on the new HDD, which also is now an 500GB WD. Size of the image (which for sure were not compressed!!) was about 189GB and it took 2½h for the restore process. Slow? I don't think so! OK, my own server also use ECC buffered memories, would never use any production server without that, and that's maybe one of the problems you were facing with the restoring of your image. From experiences in the past, some of the problems we had with damaged system images were mostly just related to either compression and/or memory! Anyway it's just up to you what way you like to go and if the time and size is your main concern over security, just do it as you think is best for you. Good luck.
Oh I see.. You are using HDClone mainly on a server environment.. I only used it for personal computer backup so its quite different in terms of what features matter for us. Anyway, HDClone is still a viable solution for disk imaging. Good part is it also completely portable in Win8.1PE.
Out of your 5 posts so far on this forum, three recommend Aomei, including one post repeated immediately. You should use whatever works for you but there is no need to give one line product recommendations.
I used Paragon HDM 2012 suite and HDM 2014 for some time. I saw that (unlike Acronis versions before 2013), Paragon did not require disabling secure boot to recover images. I used Paragon a lot when win 8.1 came out and there was that secure boot watermark. As of now, I keep a copy of Paragon and also a boot CD. Use Acronis though after win 8.1 update removed the secure boot watermark.
Paragon used to be my favorite computer toolset. It was solid before version 11. However for version 12 and 14, I met various problems such as crashing upon starting backup, While Clonezilla did the same backup job successfully. It also failed to perform partition resizing on an XP machine, while Gparted Live CD successfully completed the same operation. Yes Paragon claims tons of features and such in their software, however in reality it's very buggy to say the least. Hope they can bring back the reliability of the old Paragon products in the next version.
oh, regarding portable imaging app, HDDClone can be used as standalone portable App without installing. The retail package includes the standalone exe (not the installer) that can run from within Windows PE. Another portable imaging app worth mentioning is Drive Snapshot. It's a single exe with the size of only a few hundred KB, but it's very capable in imaging both NTFS and EXT2/3/4.
If you are going to backup your Windows drive, I suggest using the DVD and do the backup while booting from the DVD so that all of the files in Windows are closed. My experience is that you get a more complete backup of Windows this way. Other drives are fine to backup from within Windows as the process goes faster than from the DVD.