Ghost Hard Drive Software?

[Martin Keene]

Hi

I'm currently backing up to an external hard drive, and the other day I thought it would be useful if there was some software/freeware that instead on backing up the obvious bits, created a 'ghost', for want of a better word, of the original drive, so should the worst ever happen, it would simply be a case of swapping the drives over.

Possible?

Martin

[John Williams (Panda) - Joint Manchester AO]

if you want free and legal, then have a look at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#whatisit for basic drives and partitions

It is linux based but we have used it at the office, although you do get what you pay for.

cheers

John

[GuyH]

There are many out there, the most famous of which is called Norton Ghost funnily enough (from Symantec).

clicky

[DerekJ]

You could use "partition magic" to do this too. Again, it's from Symantec and you have to pay for it too but it's quite cheep.

Cheers

DJ

[ACW]

There's ghost by Symantec. This was good in its day about 10 years ago, but since the product almost apears as if the original writter had died and they just keep flogging it. To do imaging it boots into PC DOS which makes it crap to support NIC drivers etc.

I use Drive Snapshot which can image a machine whilst in use in windows. I then use a Bart PE boot CD to boot the machine from a bootable CD or USB device (incl memory stick) into a limited version of windows where you can snapshot back.

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/