OT: HD image backup

[David E. Gervais]

Hi, all

I was wondering if any of you know a good program to make an image backup of my "C:" drive. My C: drive has 1.65gig of used space, and I'd like to make a copy on one of my other drives as a backup that I can use for a quick install in case anyting goes wrong. I only have a CD-RW so it won't fit on a 700mb CD.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Cheers!

[twilight]

I use Norton Ghost. But it's very old, there are better ones. The main problem is, that you have to boot to make your image or play it back. If that's not a problem for you, use Norton Ghost. Other ones are able to work without booting I heard.

Don't know. But Norton Ghost works pretty well for me.

[Baron Munchausen]

A drive image requires a huge amount of space, doesn't it? As in another (larger) drive or a tape? Can you break an image into chunks?

A backup is simpler to make than than an image. You can break it up into chunks and put it on CDs or DVDs. Try Nero CD utilities, which includes a backup utility.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Thanks, BM. Didn't know Nero had that. I'll check the cd that came with the burner.

[Gandalph]

The latest Power Quest Drive Image and Norton Ghost have the ability to span the image in 700Meg chunks so that you can burn them to CD. If you make a bootable diskette for either of these programs, you can boot to it and restore your spanned image from the CD's you burned.

[rdouglass]

I used Ghost a long time ago before Norton took it over. Haven't used it since, the price went wayyyyy up! I now use Power Quest's Drive Image as the other one Gandalf mentioned and am very happy with it. I've owned it for at least 2 years now and that same Version is still working fine with my XP Pro SP2 images. It works with all Versions of FAT, FAT32, and NTFS drives that I've come across so far. I've probably used it on at least 5 different OS's (95, 98, ME, 2K, and XP) and at leat 10 different hardware configs/platforms. Have reproduced drive images at least 200 times with it. Has compression features as well which are handy.

One suggestion tho, make sure the drive you put your backup partition image on is formatted FAT. That makes it simple to boot from a floppy and restore your orig image. Not a requirement but a whole lot simpler to do.

It was probably the best $50 I ever spent (besides SEIV of course... )

[Thermodyne]

Ghost is the way to go. You can span the image across as many CD's as needed, or even push it across almost any kind of wire to another system that has spare drive space.

[David E. Gervais]

Thanks for the info people.

Cheers!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

What kind of people are 'info people'?