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back to article Backup bods Acronis extend disk-imaging support to Macs at last

Data protection house Acronis is announcing True Image for Mac (TIM - our acronym), the Apple equivalent of its True Image for Windows backup and recovery software. True Image is a full disk image backup utility. Up until now, TIM has only supported Windows. It does not run on Macs, either under Mac OS X, or with Windows …

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  1. Jay 2

    Other cloning tools are available

    Interesting from a corporate and incremental Parallels point of view. But they seem to have deliberately forgotten tools like SuperDuper! (which is what I use) and Carbon Copy Cloner exist. In fact I'm also pretty sure you can use the built-in Disk Utility to clone a disk, but I don't believe that does incremental copies.

    A cynic would say this is just a puff piece for Acronis, esp as El Reg hasn't added a bit of journo stating that other cloning tools are freely or cheaply available (albeit with a slightly lower feature set).

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  2. MacGuru

    you don't need extemz ip to get Time Machine to run over SMB network shares. agreed its still only Time Machine and limited as a backup, but zero cost... and people like free.

    considering AFP is being phased out, extremez ip is really just clinging onto legacy...

    there are other very good, Mac enterprise backup products out there..

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  3. Mike Bell

    Time Machine

    I'll stick with this, thanks, as it comes with the OS, and runs silently in the background pretty much all the time.

    I've never had an issue with it, and I'm confident that if my Mac blew up tomorrow, I'd have a replacement machine up and running exactly as before in a matter of hours.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Time Machine

      TimeMachine works really well - puts standard Windows backup to shame. Very easy to setup and use (important) - pretty quick to recover files or even the whole system - free.

      I have two backup drives and it alternates between them (think it can do more than 2) and it can backup to local drives or network drives on a NAS / Airport etc. Backups can be encrypted - are versioned - can do a full restore etc.

      I also use ARQ which versions and encrypts some critical data files and sends them off to S3 / Glacier - but that's just my paranoia as the machine uses a flash drive (already more reliable than spinning drives) and I have backups to two different Time Machine locations.

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      1. Gordon 10
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        Thumb Up

        Re: Time Machine

        Agreed - where's Time Machine for Windows when you need it?

        Now I appreciate Time Machine isn't an all singing and dancing solution but the fact that its super silent and JustWorksTM makes it a no brainer in my view.

        I wish my Win7 Box was as simple to back up.

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        1. stu 4
          Reply Icon

          Re: Time Machine

          Yup, I loved true image in the bad old days post mac (<2008).

          But not really sure I understand:

          "Time Machine is great, but it doesn't protect against hardware failure/destruction and is inflexible, doesn't allow for incremental backups for virtual machines and True Image for Mac allows for much more flexible backup schedules (no more "do you want to back up to Time Machine" reminders)."

          eh ?

          In what way does it not support from hardware failure ? It absolutely does. I have recovery a timemachine back up onto new hard drives in a machine (Where harddrive has failed), or into a completely new machine - hell the power/design of OSX means I can restore a backup onto any mac I have - even if hardware is completely different (different north/south bridge, processor, graphics card the lot) and it still works fine.

          AND it knows the difference between apps/libraries and OS, so I can, say restore the timemachine backup of all my applications on my desktop to my newly bought macbook - and it will just work - all apps added to macbook.

          inflexible backup schedules and reminders??? eh ? there are NO reminders. there is NO schedule. the defining USP of timemachine is that it is just working - all the time in the background (ok..every hour)... it doesn't REMIND me to run, it just runs. no stupid reminder on a sunday night to run a backup like true image does...

          I will give it the vm one - as VMs are effectively one big bastard file, then sure - timemachine makes a meal of these - so much so that I have them excluded from backups. But arguably you could use snapshots in your VM for the same purpose and get more out of it.

          So... really not sure why they bothered here.

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    2. Vince
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      Re: Time Machine

      ...tell that to my customer who thought this only to find out that wasn't at all the experience. It was also responsible for several of the connectivity glitches she had with it's insistence on controlling your Internet connection by default.

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    3. razorfishsl
      Reply Icon

      Re: Time Machine

      Time machine fails BADLY as regards backups, it DOES NOT backup as it should.

      Once you start trying to get it to do things like backup multicase or non- western content, then it can and does go badly wrong.

      But its true failures occur when used with synology NAS systems and certain disk types, so much so it can lead to the total loss of all data, especially when used with ISCSI subsystems.

      I won't even bother to say how many outstanding failure cases I have with timemachine & Synology, and whilst they come back with ' it's not been reported before or is not an issue', several months may go by before they ask me to crack open my SSH to the synology and make hard changes to the internal OS configuration files.

      The sad thing with timemachine, is you won't know you are dead in the water until you try to recover something really critical, only to find out that Timemachine reports some sort of 'internal database corruption'

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What is the point when Time Machine does a very good job already (and yes does support HFS+ and Filevault 2 etc.), it's free and supported by Apple.

    If you want more Carboncopy Cloner can give you a copy of your hard drive / data that you can just boot from and carry on working and applications like ARQ can give you versioning (to the cloud) if you want an off-site copy. Both support HFS+ and File Vault 2 volumes.

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  5. Wheaty73

    Fifty quid?

    And it won't even clone Bootcamp, arguably the most important bit to backup since you can already continually backup your Mac disk via Time Machine. Want it bootable? Press R on boot and restore. Or use CCC or SuperDuper (excellent software from Shirt Pocket). Time Machine and the others will do backups of VMware and Parallels stuff too.

    Winclone will back up Bootcamp, but doesn't do incrementals.

    Fifty quid...

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    1. Fink-Nottle
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      Re: Fifty quid?

      Not only do you have the initial purchase price, but if Acronis follows the same pricing model as Parallels, there'll be a hefty upgrade fee with every OS X point release.

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      1. Paul Shirley
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        Re: Fifty quid?

        If they follow the PC pricing policy expect a 'buy a completely new copy' upgrade policy, like they did for Win8 3 months after I last upgraded.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Time Machine

    Time Machine is worth its weight in gold. Deleted an email yesterday that you need back? Just a few clicks! So easy and utterly wonderful. Someone who could code that for Windows would get my money!

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is why I switches to a Mac - backups are critical - backup software for Windows is poor (the bundled one) and I've never had that much success with 3rd party options. Certainly nothing like Time Machine on the Mac - add in full disk encryption and it solves a lot of problems without having to resort to extra cost / hassle.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      I'd guess most of the Mac detractors have never actually used one properly and never used Time Machine and just assume it's like the poor Windows backup software.

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  8. Dieter Haussmann

    I like Carbon Copy Cloner and it's built in scheduling for my Macs.

    Backs up silently using SSH to a Drobo on another Mac then emails a notification..

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  9. Reallydo Wannaknow
    Linux

    Don't forget the penguin!

    Acronis has supported Linux for at least the past six years that I know of.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    a pox on their houses

    Acronis used to provide excellent disk and volume imaging software up until 2010

    It was easy to use, did what had to do at an affordable price and had good customer support.

    Then it somehow turned to shit. Their products stopped working, support became clueless. Their cloud version is a joke, backing up to /dev/null has a better restore success rate. I'd avoid this version at all cost.

    anon because at work

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    1. Chris Parsons
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      Re: a pox on their houses

      Totally agree. I tried it on SBS 2011 and even their support people couldn't get it to work. Shame, it used to be brilliant. Time Machine is how backup should work, at least for domestic users.

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  11. Amorous Cowherder

    Acronis True Image is good for Windows but they're not going to get far in Mac-land. Time Machine is the one thing I miss not having on Windows, it's a superb piece of software that's never let me down in 5 years of owning a Mac.

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Image Backup iMac

    I use Image for Linux to do offline backup of the iMac. Even worked with my bootcamp setup (had to set an option, I don't recall what it was).

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  13. jubtastic1

    TimeMachine, Timemachine, Timemashin.

    Well, for starters, it does all the stuff they claim it doesn't do, local or network backups, versioning, restore everything including the OS, restore to a new disk or mac.

    It's not pretty under the hood though, and in my experience, less reliable than say, superduper or carbon copy cloner or Chronosync or Rsync. It is effortless though.

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