Windows Backup Software Review - 'Bare Metal Showdown 2' - Part 2

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Overview of the contenders
Test 1 - Hard disk copy
Test 2 - Drive to image
Test 3 - Image to drive
Test 4 - Rescue CD
Test 5 - Real world hard disk copy
Features at a glance
Conclusions
Comment on this article

About the tests

For all the tests except the last one, two identical Western Digital 'Caviar Blue' hard drives (model number WCAV2C396292) were used, each with 250 gigabytes of free space. We installed Windows 7 Professional edition to one drive (which we will refer to as the source drive). The other drive was used as the destination drive for each of the copy operations.

Test number 1 - Hard disk copy - Drive to drive

For the first test, using each backup tool in turn we copied the Windows drive (the drive we were currently running Windows from) directly to the destination drive. We then removed the source drive and attempted to boot from the destination drive. When the drive copy was completed we checked the integrity of the files on the destination drive using a simple CRC check. Happily, each program that managed to copy the disk did so without corrupting the file contents.

Program	Time (mm:ss)	Boot?	Notes

Acronis True Image 2010	03:59	Yes	Had to reboot to start copy
Easus Todo Backup 1.1	05:37	Yes	"Windows did not shut down properly" message
Nero Backitup 4	N/A	N/A	Not supported
Norton Ghost 15	N/A	N/A	Not permitted in trial version
Paragon Drive backup 10	N/A	N/A	Incorrect directory structure error

Nero BackItUp does not support drive to drive copies, though you can first copy the drive to an image file and then out to a different drive, but more on that later. Our first major upset came from Paragon Drive Backup. Like Acronis True Image, the Paragon package insisted that we rebooted our computer to start the backup. After rebooting, the machine booted into Paragon's own special operating system and attempted to start copying the disk. However, the software kept reporting that our disk had an "Incorrect directory structure error". We ran the Windows Chkdsk program on the drive just to be sure, but no such error was found. Very disappointing performance from the Paragon product.

Easeus Todo Backup was the only product that didn't require a reboot to copy the system drive. With Microsoft's new shadow copy technology it should be possible to backup a drive without having to shut down the operating system that is running on it. However, Acronis was quicker at copying the drive by first rebooting the system into it's own custom OS.

When we booted the drive copied by Easeus Todo Backup, Windows popped up a message saying it had not been shut down properly. By ignoring the message and starting Windows everything was fine however.

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