Best Boot Drive Imaging Software

[JMasterJ]

Hey guys, would like a general consensus on what you think is the best to use to backup a boot drive to an external so that if anything goes wrong on the internal boot, I can just pop a new drive in there and image/recover it back over easily, no frills, high reliability... and of course free is always good as long as it works for this one purpose: Acronis True Image Norton Ghost Clonezilla (free/open source) G4L (free/open source) BackupPC (free/open source) Bacula (free/open source) (Any Linux app, Ghost, ddrescue, etc....) (If applicable, Windows XP Pro and will have many programs installed, and possibly large files, i.e., HD video files, going from a 1TB internal to a 1TB external)

[KarmaKiller]

Paragon
Drive Backup Express - Free Download!

Simple, easy, and free. What more could you ask?

[Martoch]

We use Symantec Ghost at work and I use Acronis TrueImage at home...I personally prefer Acronis.

Karma, have you used Paragon?

[KarmaKiller]

yeah, I used it when I had to swap out HDD's in my dual core rig. I imaged a almost full 40gig drive, and replaced it with a 80gig. I think the compressed saved file was like 27gigs, or something close to that. I used a flash drive to load on the boot program, threw the image on a external HDD, hooked that up and off I went.
Worked very well for me. I now image my PC's about once a month or so with it, just for safe keeping.

[JMasterJ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by KarmaKiller

yeah, I used it when I had to swap out HDD's in my dual core rig. I imaged a almost full 40gig drive, and replaced it with a 80gig. I think the compressed saved file was like 27gigs, or something close to that. I used a flash drive to load on the boot program, threw the image on a external HDD, hooked that up and off I went.
Worked very well for me. I now image my PC's about once a month or so with it, just for safe keeping.

That sounds good, and yes free is good when it works... so u imaged them in a way u dont have to reinstall any of the programs correct? Also, I know this is a bit off topic and another problem I never really resolved before, but what kind of boot flash drive did u use? For some reason I have had the biggest trouble making one, tried that HP tool, etc, but I wonder if u can enlighten me to do this once and for all. Thanks!

[KarmaKiller]

Quote:

so u imaged them in a way u dont have to reinstall any of the programs correct?

Yes, I imaged my whole partition. That way I had another separate 40gb Part for extra storage, and it still booted properly. I had all my usual programs on there, with games even, and they all worked fine after.

Quote:

but what kind of boot flash drive did u use?

[JMasterJ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by KarmaKiller

I have a 8Gb USB flash drive. I copied the boot loader download to the flash drive. Then set my motherboard to boot from USB devices, it booted off that and I had the image on my 60gb USB HDD. So I pointed the boot loader program to the image that I saved, that was it.

But you might be having problems maybe because you have to set it up in your BIOS to boot from USB devices, and not HDD/CD/etc.

Oh I know about the bios setting stuff, but I mean what boot loader did u copy into the flash drive, does paragon come with one or did u use a third party?

[KarmaKiller]

You download it off pargon's site.

[JMasterJ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by KarmaKiller

You download it off pargon's site.

I'm sorry, I am either really tired or it is hidden somehow... is it under the Download section? I dont see any boot or startup image or file for download there... unless u r referring to the "Rescue Kit" software they have.

[KarmaKiller]

Oh wait. I just opened paragon up. It's a option in the first menu. You just have to download the one program.
Sorry