Interesting New Cloning Software

[bdwilcox]

I'm a total Ghost fanatic, but I'm hesitant to use it to clone existing systems to an SSD due to the alignment issue. Paragon Software makes a cloning software suite called Drive Copy and their newest version, Drive Copy 11 Professional, makes this claim:
"Automatic alignment - Automatically aligns partitions to boost drive performance"

Anyone have any experience with Paragon's cloning software?

[tanker27]

I have been looking for a Good cloning program myself as I have a new larger SSD on the way and I want to clone my existing one. I am still surprised to hear that Ghost still hasnt fixed that 'issue'.

[Neutronbeam]

I've got experience with Paragon's cloning software, specifically Hard Disk Manager 2010 Professional Edition, and recommend it highly.

I've used it to clone an Intel 80GB SSD to a Phoenix 120GB SSD, and to clone a WD 320GB laptop drive to a WD 500GB laptop drive. Both cloning efforts went flawlessly. I was concerned with sector alignment with the SSDs -- Paragon made available at no cost its Paragon Alignment Tool 2.0 -- but everything went fine.

IIRC, Hard Disk Manager 2010 Professional Edition was recommended by CPU magazine (I'm a subscriber) and PCMag may have liked it too. I've used Acronis for several years, but now I'm a Paragon fan.

[bdwilcox]

I'm interested in the Paragon cloning software because I've experienced some quirky behavior in the past with Acronis True Image and Ghost is now a Symantec product...'nuff said.

[tanker27]

[quote="bdwilcox"... Ghost is now a Symantec product...'nuff said.[/quote]

Symantec has 'owned' Ghost for some time now.

[FubbHead]

Acronis. 'Nuff said.

[bdwilcox]

Symantec has 'owned' Ghost for some time now.

Yes, and Symantec destroyed the desktop version of Ghost but left alone the Enterprise version which is still developed by the original coders who came over from Binary Research. Unfortunately, Symantec now seems to be tainting that development team as well. Their pace of innovation has faltered and they're being left behind by smaller, hungrier competitors like Paragon. I'm tired of dealing with Symantec's "support"; the fact that their products have gotten buggier only means I now have to deal with said "support" more often. Time to look around for alternatives.

[Ethyriel]

If anyone has experience with Paragon's enterprise stuff, I'd be interested in that as well. I'm looking to finally move on up from Clonezilla at work, and am looking at Paragon Deployment Manager using Adaptive Image/Restore and Disk Manager. Acronis Snap Deploy is more expensive and ties licenses to MAC addresses with no transferring on top of that, and we'd need the IT Edition of ShadowProtect which is prohibitively expensive.

I don't mean to thread jack, but hey, if their enterprise stuff is quality, it looks like their consumer stuff is very closely tied to it. I did start playing with a demo of Hard Disk Manager Pro today. I don't know just what functionality the consumer version loses, if any, but at first glance it looks like it can do anything I could want to do with a client computer's disks. The interface is a little quirky, but at the same time, I think they make good design decisions that keep it easy to use.

But it's $50/$80 for the consumer and pro versions, respectively. If you're just going to use it for one migration and then have to worry about compatibility quirks with future technology on the then older version you get today... just use Clonezilla and Parted Magic.

[UberGerbil]

If you're just looking at a one-time migration, the free trial version of Acronis Easy Migrate can do that too. But I don't know if it handles the partition offset for SSDs correctly when migrating from an XP-formatted HD.

[jenova.b]

what is mean by cloning??

[bdwilcox]

what is mean by cloning??

Cloning is the act of duplicating the contents of a hard drive from one physical drive to another. There are two types of cloning. One is a smart clone that clones at the file level and doesn't copy unnecessary files or blank sections of the drive; it can also grow or shrink partitions to fit the new drive. The other type of clone is a sector or forensics clone. It copies everything from the source drive sector by sector, unaware of the contents of the drive and even copies empty areas of the drive. This makes the sector clone very slow and inflexible because it copies the whole drive (not selected bits of it), and won't resize any partitions, thus making cloning to a smaller target drive impossible. But with a sector clone you can clone just about any drive regardless of the file system or OS on it.

So a common use of a clone is moving to a bigger hard drive without reinstalling Windows, reinstalling all your applications and moving over your data. You can clone your original hard drive to a new drive, swap the old drive out for the new one and boot the computer to an exact duplicate or "clone" of the prior system. Everything will work exactly as before and all your data will still be in the same place.