backup software
 

anyone here use backup software?
to create images of their hard drives?

well over the weekend i tried out norton ghost.

1st problem ... ghost is nothing without norton save & restore!

NS&R is the one that will create a bootable cd/dvd to allow you to recover the image you created.
in fact NS&R does both by itself, ie bootable cd/dvd and creation of harddrive image so no need to use ghost.

installed NS&R, created the image on a separate hard drive.
created my bootable recovery disc.

then for the sake of it, formated my hard drive!
was really nervous at this stage.

amazingly, i was able to boot up with the recovery cd and then managed to copy back my hardrive data from the image under 10 minutes!

absolutely no problems as far as i can tell.
everything was there and in working order.

this is by far much easier and less time consuming than re-installing windows and all the other junk i have on my harddrive.

the only downside is that NS&R (and norton ghost) is bloatware.
so many exes and services running when you install the dang thing.

and no matter what i did i could not get NS&R to burn the image to a dvd.

have read somewhere that powerquest drive image allows images to be burnt straight to dvd.

so questions to the members are:
1) have you used such software?
2) which one(s) do you recommend?

I use Paragon Drive Backup.
I got fed up with Ghost in 2003, and switched to the Paragon product.
It's much better.

chief, paragon seems quite nice at first glance.
one Q though.

estimated size of image is 4GB with best compression, but ghost created an image of under 3GB.
is there some tweak i'm missing?

Ghost lies, the estimates are very fubar. Paragon does not lie.

oooh lordy. for "once" you're wrong.

paragon - i only went as far the screen that estimated the final image size.

ghost - i actually created the image and indeed it was about 3GB. but i had to create a second cd for having the bootup capability. didn't read how to create a "all-in-one", ie both bootup recover cd and having harddrive image. maybe if i actually READ the help files...

at the moment, i slightly favour paragon as its not bloatware.
i'll keep looking for the "ideal" one for my purposes.

I use Power Quest Drive Image for creating my Images. Excellent software. For backups I use both Arcserve and Veritas. With Drive Image I create my image and create a bootable DVD which works great. Never had any issues at all, and been using it for 5 + years now.

powerquest - taken over by symantec right?
and discontinued that product in favour of norton save & restore and norton ghost?

just tried arconis true image
managed to create the image and the bootable disc on one dvd
but simply could not get it to restore the image
maybe it was me?
also arconis had several services running
HATE bloatware

tcel93, could you set me straight as to whether powerquest is still going or not?
and whether it is simply 1 exe or does it have several background services running?

cheers

Powerquest was swallowed whole by Norton/Symantec years ago.

Yeah, your right, Symantec took them over, then they came out with Ghost Solutions Suite. Haven't tried that one, I still use deploy center/drive image myself.