Me however, kind of used to the cold imaging of an OS. Hot imaging nowadays is much more convenient than the old school boot USB method, and it's reliable also. Consequently I have since uninstalled ATI 2014 and I now only use its Linux boot disk for backing up (and I continue to use DS as well).

That said, the ATI 2014 installation was huge (in size) and hot backups had some quirky issues. In all of the preceding cases the resulting image sizes were pretty close, with ATI's images about 5% larger than those of DS. For cold backups, ATI 2014 leaves DS in the dust, backing up in about half the time of DS! ATI 2014 is also nearly twice as fast as DS making differential snapshots (DS doesn't do incrementals), but (interestingly) I find DS is able to complete its restores in about 10 - 20% less time than ATI 2014. Insofar as performance, I found the free ATI WD Edition to be totally crippled, taking at least double and often triple the time of ATI 2014 to backup and restore! For hot backups, ATI 2014 was about 20 -30% faster than Drive Snapshot (depending on whether I was backing up my Win7 or XP system). I did not upgrade to ATI 2015 as the ATI 2014 boot disk works great on my Win7 and XP systems and the 'what's new for 2015' didn't impress me. I am an Acronis TI 2014 user, along with Drive Snapshot and formerly, the free ATI WD Edition. Looks like Acronis and SP would be my imager of choice for Windows system in a while. Granted, I only use the boot CD and image from outside of Windows. I know it was fast before, but did not realize it's so much faster than other imagers.ĭespite ppl reported bugs in the 2015 version, I have been using Acronis for more than 10 years and never had any problems. The speed of Acronis is just too impressive. The most significant difference is the time used: Acronis only needed 1.7 min, SP 3.2min, and IFL 5.1min.

The resulting images are almost the same size: Acronis image: 11.6GB, IFL image 11.7GB and SP image 12.4 GB. The only options I changed were the compression level: for Acronis and SP, used high compression for IFL, used enhanced size - A.

In all three programs, default parameters are used. The test was to image the whole SSD OS drive, and saved the images to the HDD drive. Have a 2nd HDD in the same computer as a storage drive.

File system is NTFS, Windows 8.1 Enterprise X64 on a 128GB SSD. Tested the backup speed for three imagers (all boot cd, and cold image): Acronis TI 2015, IFL v2.93 and Shadow Protect v5.2.4.

Acronis true image 2015 tutorial