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Recommendation for image?

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gbaughma

gbaughma

IS-IT--Management
Staff member
Nov 21, 2003
4,772
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I'm running Vista SP1.

I recently had a virus that after a few days of messing around with it, I did a reinstall. I make backups and so forth, but it was a royal pain to get everything put back.

I'd like to do an image of my machine; make some bootable DVD's. I honestly couldn't find the options to do that in Ghost 12.

I looked at XXCopy (didn't see my C: drive).

Any suggestions on an easy-to-use (and preferably free, I'm broke [rofl]) imaging / disaster recovery system that will work for Vista?

Thanks in advance!


Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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Well, I firmly believe you get what you pay for when it comes to technology. So if you think Ghost sucks, something free is going to be WAY worse.

If you don't like Ghost try Acronis True Image and it is a fairly reasonably priced at $50. Cheaper than Ghost anyway. If you keep an eye on some of the deal sites (hot-deals.org or Fatwallet) once in a while Acronis will offer their older versions for free. It has been a couple of years but you never know.

Every thing else I use or would suggest is WAY more expensive.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!
 
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Hi Greg,

I would think just about any free cloning program like HDclone would work fine, but only to clone to another HDD...you've got at least one old one lying around, right? This one:


looks interesting but I have no experience with it.

Another thought would be to invest (sell some cr@p on eBay or steal your wife's purse) $30 (including shipping, eBay) on Acronis True Image 10 or 11. This is a much more useful imaging solution.

If you had to restore from DVDs made today you would lose all your changes going forward, possibly months of changes. Acronis does incremental imaging on a schedule you determine to another hard disk (along with keeping the original version separate & intact), so when you do actually have to re-image your image will be MUCH more current than the one you made the day of install. It's more like System Restore than static imaging.

Look at all the time you spent, throw in the inconvenience factor, and compare to $30 (Acronis) + maybe $40 (new 80GB HDD) to your time spent. Remember an image made today will not be as much of a labor-saver as recovering from one made the day before your virus attack.

Tony

Users helping Users...
 
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I use to use ghost...way back when...but have used Aconis for the last few years starting with ver. 7. I currently use ver. 10. It does automatic backups weekly and monthly to a spare drive I've installed for just this purpose. I even have a system dvd backup for extreme cases.

As recommended by all those before Acronis is simple and it works.

Cheers
 
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Acronis make some good products, but if you simply want to clone a drive, you can do so very easily (and freely) with a Linux live CD.

Boot from the CD (Knoppix or the like).
Open a terminal.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb (where sda is disk to be copied and sdb is the destination).
Job done.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer
 
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Thanks for all the ideas.

I'm not sure that Linux will see my Vista drives... but it's worth dropping in a live Knoppix CD to find out. :)

Meanwhile, I'm off to the Acronis web site to see what it's about.



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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Hi Greg,

dd performs a a sector by sector copy of the drive, so it doesn't care what's on it; but Linux can read NTFS anyhow :)



"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer
 
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You know, I downloaded Acronis (the 15-day trial).... and I have to say, I wasn't real happy.

I installed it, and it wanted a reboot.

Next thing I knew, it was re-partitioning my hard drive (!!!!!)

After I figured out how to undo that, I uninstalled it again.

Verdict: NOT IMPRESSED.



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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Wow, Greg, I never had any bad experiences with Acronis in the years I've been using it. My guess is you were trying the Home version, which I will admit to not using for a long time. I only use workstation and server versions.

The reboot upon install is normal, but it sounds like Acronis was trying to create its Recovery Partition, which I thought was an option selected by the user. If it isn't and Acronis is now trying to decide what is best for you without asking, than I can understand being less than impressed when watching one's drive being sliced up like a pie.

Del
 
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Freestone:

Well, it certainly didn't ask me "Is it OK if I snag 290GB of your 500GB Hard drive".

Let me see... how would I have answered that.... oh, yeah, "HELL NO!" [rofl]

Meanwhile, I did find a pretty slick little program, although I'm waiting for the "Next version". It's called SelfImage. It's freeware, it has a BartPE plugin, and it GZips the image.

Downsides: It doesn't dice up the file yet (it makes ONE HUGE image of the hard drive). Future versions are supposed to split the files so that you can burn them to CD/DVD. Really, that's the only feature that's missing.



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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Wow.....

Have you actually used PING?

I downloaded the ISO, booted it up. Nice splash screen.

That's about the only thing I was impressed with.

I never did get it to work. It booted, I got the menu. It says "Which partition do you want to backup/restore?"

I chose it.

It asked me for the restore file.

I didn't want to restore. I wanted to back up.

I read the manual. Twice. It seems that the manual on the download page is not for the latest version (3.00)... the manual was kind of fun, though... it included such great quips such as:

Ping manual said:
Finally, tell the wizard how will be called your new image.
Click to expand...

... and ...

Ping Manual said:
Using this tool, you should be able either to backup, either to restore systems and partitions.
Click to expand...

Anyway... I honestly couldn't get it to work. The first time I went through and told it to do a backup of my OS partition, it warned me I was about to overwrite my partition. I bombed out of the program, and read the instructions again.

The second time, I followed the instructions to the letter (as close as I could, for the wrong version of the program), and the program dumped me out to a shell prompt.

Verdict: P.O.S.


Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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You know, in retrospect, this shouldn't be such a difficult thing to do.

I want to:

1) Boot off of a CD.
2) Be given the choice to either make a new image or restore one.
3) If making one, ask me the destination.
3a) If that destination is a DVD, it would be *REALLY* nice to have it bootable and self-restoring.

I just need an idiot-proof way to drop a DVD into a computer, and have it boot from that DVD and restore the image.


Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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Actually I have used PING before, admittedly it was a year ago now but when I did it worked as intended.

As far as your request goes, the only app that I can really think that does something like that would be Ghost.

Simon

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.

 
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Greg, Curiosity go the better of me so I downloaded and installed Acronis True Image Home 2009 in a Virtual PC session. After the expected restart of the system and program start, I was greeted with a dialog box about Acronis One-Click Protection. Near the bottom of this screen it states the amount of drive space that will be taken for the Acronis Secure Zone.

This dialog box must be where the re-partitioning came in for you. It isn't automatic. You can select either not to create this Recovery Zone by selecting another destination point or hit cancel to stop the process altogether.
 
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Greg,

What happened at Acronis install (I assume) was it wanting a place to store its image, and I'm also assuming you did not have a backup drive connected. As an imaging tool, it creates at least (2) images in your backup directory; a pristine static image from today, and a dynamic image for incremental backups.

Try installing it with an external (or internal) backup drive connected, and assign that as your backup volume.

Tony

Users helping Users...
 
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BadBigBen:

See, now that looks NOTHING like the PING interface....



Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg
 
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