For years, I have been using the Symantec DOS program Ghost for imaging my hard drives for back up. IBM (Lenovo) had a PC warehouse sale last weekend, and I bought my wife a new desktop. It came with a 2-partition 80GB HDD, and I wanted to upgrade it to a 160GB. Ghost appeared to work, but the system would not boot from it. I checked with some buddies that work in the HDD group at Lenovo, and they had seen the same problems. The recommended a software called EZ Gig II. I tried it, and it worked great!! Here is the URL for their website: http://www.apricorn.com/product_detail.php?type=reg&id=1108
That looks like a good solution, especially for people who don't have an external USB drive or network drive to backup an image to. I like DriveImage XML, it's a software solution like Ghost (but not quite as fast) that is free. I've used it for years to create and restore drive images: http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm It works great with a BartPE boot disk to backup any drive regardless of the OS.
This looks pretty interesting. I, personally, use Acronis due to many issues with Ghost in the past, but it is hard to beat a "free" solution if it works. 2 questions. First, have you had to do a recovery yet? If so, how did it go and did it take a long time? Second, they mention that the images are stored in XML files. These must be pretty darned big, how do they actually store the data? Is there a schema provided describing each XML tag? My guess is that this is one reason it might be a bit slower than others, but it sure does provide a lot of safety in not being locked into a proprietary image file format. Thanks, ps. Where in the PNW are you?
I've used it many times to restore drive images. I wanted to give Vista a try and imaged my laptop and desktop first, installed Vista (didn't like it) and restored both machines without any issues. I've done that several other times trying various operating systems. You can also use DriveImage to browse the backups and extract only what you want, if there was one file you needed for example you can pull that one out. Ghost has a similar tool ,Ghost Explorer, I'd expect Acronis probably does too. It has an option to "split large images" so the backup is actually multiple files. Each file that makes up the drive image isn't terribly huge, 656 meg, with a 25-35 meg XML file that maps out which bit goes where on the drive. The size of the XML file varies with how much actual data was on the drive being backed up. The restores go quicker than the creation of the image, it's been a while but as I recall it took about 30-40 min to restore an 80gig laptop over a 10/100 network connection. I'm a bit east of you Bill, near Duvall (south of Monroe).
I haven't tried the image option, but with the disk clone, if you have a failure, you remove the failed drive, and replace it with the clone, and your back up and running
On PC's I use Arconis TrueImage, on the macs I use SuperDuper. I have never had good luck with Norton/Symantic products.
That's exactly what I use. Acronis on the PC and SuperDuper on the Mac and couldn't more satisfied. Rich
