Windows Backup Software Review - 'Bare Metal Showdown 2' - Part 4

Test number 4 - Image to drive via rescue CD

Having a rescue CD (or bootable USB drive) is a vital part of using disk backup programs such as these. If you find yourself unable to boot your hard drive then you'll need some way of restoring a drive image without loading Windows. Using the rescue CD's created by each product and the images we created in test number 2, we restored each image in turn to the destination drive and attempted to boot it.

Again, a boot failure from the Norton product (even after specifying that we wanted the master boot record restored) left us scratching our heads. For the rest of the packages they all performed well. The disk recovered with Todo Backup gave us the "Windows did not shut down properly" message again and suggested we run Chkdsk on all our disks, but after that everything was just fine.

Nero BackItUp again suffers from a lack of information regarding the drives attached to the computer. This is even worse in the rescue CD as it is not possible to use another tool to double check your selections.

For some reason we had to run a manual validation scan (i.e check the image) on our drive image before Acronis would let us restore it. Acronis is the fastest performer in this test, although why it was necessary to run a test on the drive image before restoring it we do not know. Hopefully this is just a limitation in the trial version of the software.

Test number 5 - Disk to disk copy of a working Windows XP installation

For our final test we wanted to use some "real world" conditions. To do this, we took a regularly used Windows XP installation on a 150 Gigabyte Western Digital Raptor drive and installed the backup packages. This particular installation of XP is used for both gaming and productivity software. As an added obstacle, the drive was full disk encrypted with Truecrypt. This should not be a problem when using the Windows versions of the backup packages as by the time Windows loads, the drive is unlocked and behaves exactly like a normal hard drive. Nevertheless this should be mentioned especially in light of the results we collected. The owner of the PC expressed a dislike for Norton software in general and asked that we did not install Ghost. Because it had already failed us twice we agreed and tested the other packages instead. The results were quite alarming:-

As you can see, the only two programs that were successfully able to copy the disk were Nero BackItUp and Acronis True Image. Nero does not support disk to disk copies so we first had to create an image of the drive and then copy that image back out to the destination drive (using the Nero Boot CD). Both Paragon Drive Backup and Easeus Todo Backup failed to copy the drive at all. Todo Backup failed with "Internal Error" around half way through the copy whereas the ever disappointing Paragon Drive Backup gave us "Launcher.exe caused an illegal operation and will be shut down" before the drive copy even started.

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