I use Ghost only to have a clean setup of windows each time I would need to reinstall in case of something wrong after installation of an application. For the rest I prefer to make incremental backup on cdrom each week.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mondorescue/?topic_id=137 use it for linux but it supports anything i believe - home page is down at the moment. i run as cron job to make full image backups every week and rsync the image offsite. burn the image to disc and its a bootable cd that will restores the image.
I just use the Windows XP backup. Just be sure to go to "advanced" and select the ASR (automatic system recovery). It will do a complete backup of your hard drive. I backup to a second hard drive. I've used this to completely reformat and restore to my C: drive without any problem.
I'm getting an 80MB WD USB 2.0 external drive. I'll use it to clone my PC's hard drive. My aim is to be able to boot from it if my harddrive dies. It looks like Ghost 2003 might not be able to make an external bootable drive. Has anyone tried it? It looks like Casper XP can do this. Thanks, Chinook
I'm planning to return my external hard drive because it looks like XP will not boot from it. I'll continue posting in this thread: http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=419227 Chinook
I use removable hard drive bays for my C drive and backup drive. During normal operations, I keep a LS-120 drive in the backup drive bay. When I want to make a mirror image of my C drive, I shutdown and replace the LS-120 drive with a backup hard drive. I boot from the hard drive manufacturers free tools disk and make a copy of my C drive. It is as easy as using a floppy disk. It gives me an exact replacement bootable copy of my C drive. I always keep 3 backup copies made on different dates. This has saved my ass many times when I have made changes to my system or software that did not work out the way I wanted. I use WD hard drives; But, I think all hard drive manufacturers have free tools for making a copy of drives. I always use the IDE secondary channel for installing the backup bay. The PC boots from the primary IDE Channel hard drive.
Does this work on laptop drives also? I'm planning to buy a new laptop which has the same capacity drive as my desktop (60GB), which has 2 partitions 1 20-GB and 1 40GB. I'd like to be able to clone my system on the desktop exactly on the laptop. BTW, my desktop has XP-Pro, while the laptop will come shipped with XP Home. Is this doable with Casper XP?
I can't say for sure - just email them. They're pretty quick to respond and the program works great for straight old drive to new drive cloning. (Thanks again saxon.)
wavetrader, Casper XP makes an exact copy of your hard drive. That is great for a backup drive, because if your primary fails, you can just pop it out, pop in the backup, reboot, and your system is back up in minutes. However, an exact copy is almost certainly not going to work for a new machine, especially two machines as different as a laptop and desktop, since each machine has its own particular set of drivers and registry entries. For the purpose of migrating from one machine to another, perhaps a ghosting app would be better. Maybe some of the other guys who are more expert about computers could comment. But for the purpose of creating and maintaining a backup drive for the same machine, Casper XP is flawless. saxon