I’m looking for a good way to backup my system and selected files onto an external hard drive.
I’ve tried Norton Ghost 10 but I’m not too happy with it because it is constantly open in the system tray with processes running at all times (as seems to be the trend these days).
I just want to be aple to open the application whenever I desire (could be weekly or even monthly depending on how I’m using the machine) and take an image of my hard drive for use in case of infection or other disaster.
Nero BackIt Up (part of nero 6 or 7) works great them backing up all my documents, also it has feature to back up all hard drive, but actually I’ve never used it, so I can’t say how restore process works…
I’ve got Nero too but had forgotten about it. It used to drive me mad when converting avi to DVD because it always caused the audio to lag so I stopped using it (VSO ConvertXtoDVD is great for this by the way, and beleive me I’ve tried them all http://www.vso-software.fr/products/convert_x_to_dvd/) . Not sure I’d trust Nero to backup my system but I’ll have a look at it again.
I’m still using Drive Image 7 last PowerQuest version before Symantec buy out, it isn’t on the tray but there is a service running in the background ‘PQV2iSvc.exe,’ I think this has to do with the fact that you can run an image whilst windows is running. This may also be why you have the icon in Ghost.
I have heard of Boot-it NG http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ which by all accounts is good (I haven’t tried this) and Acronis TrueImage, although my friend had lots of hassle with the last version of it (I did too when I installed the trial to try and help with his problem) and he went over to DI 7 like me. Many of the new disk imaging programs also require the .net framework and this integration may be why services are running in the background.
If you want to buy, choose Acronis for sure. Much more reliable than Norton Ghost in my tests (image corruption).
Even more features (like copying in a hide, protected, partition).
Free Backup? Maybe ViceVersa, CobianBackup and a lot of others that could be found and compared in the download specialized sites (www.snapfiles.com for instance).
I agree. Acronis True Image 9 is THE choice to backup an entire partition or just a part of it, make incremental or differential backups and best of all recover the whole partition image just in case you can’t even boot in normal nor safe mode. Also, Acronis supports SATA drives that Symantec’s solution don’t.
Well, Acronis have even more features: make backup of Linux partitions (REISERSF and EXT3), make backups booting by CD (not only restore like Norton Ghost), and for sure is more reliable, less ‘invalid’ or ‘corrupted’ backup than Symantec 8)
Easily created a bootable CD that boots to a slick Acronis GUI capable of searching any drive including USB for backup images to restore the entire system from. No processes running in the background, just does what I want when I want.