OT: Imaging Drive for Backup Restore

Sorry to top post, but...I use True Image from Acronis. It does exactly what you need. I have used it to restore my old laptop from a backup when the old hard drive crashed, plus I've done many other backups of various computers with it. It has saved me hours and hours of time. You can get True Image from NewEgg for about $30 depending on the sale. This is great software, well worth the money paid.

You can use True Image (and Ghost and similiar products) in two ways: in Windows, you can create an image of any drive (even a Linux drive) to file(s) somewhere else, such as on an ext. hard drive. Then you can mount that image as a new drive letter as a read-only drive and explore it or copy files as you would any other drive. For example, when I got my new Dell, I started copying files from the backup image I made of the Toshiba on my ext hard drive. I plugged in the ext. drive, mounted the image backup file as a new drive, then searched for the files I wanted, then copied them to my Dell.

You can also run True Image outside of Windows from rescue media, a CD created from the Windows version that you can then boot. So, if your laptop hard drive crashes, you replace the laptop hard drive, connect your ext. hard drive containing the image backup you made of the old one, and boot the rescue CD. Then you can restore the image to the new hard drive and just reboot when done, and you're all running again! I did exactly this last summer with my old laptop and it worked like a charm.

You can also clone a drive, which is a more limited way to image it. You have to use the entire drive for the clone, whereas an image is just one or more files that contain your backup. Also, True Image image files are compressed and not the full size of the original drive. So if your laptop drive is 100GB but you are using only 20GB, the image file will be no larger than 20GB, probably even less due to compression (and you can choose the compression level - more compression increases the time to make the image). You can also do incremental backups, so you don't have to make a new full backup every time do want to backup. And you can restrict the image files to be a certain size (like the size of a DVD or CD) and split them up, so a 20GB image file could be split into 5 or 6 files that you could then burn to DVD - and you can restore them that way too, one DVD or CD at a time.

So it works great. I haven't used Ghost or anything else, but they must be similiar.

Andrew

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Andrew -- ******************************************************************* *******************************************************************