VeeshanVault

Ok, so I finally got myself a 250gb external drive, and Id like to backup my two HD's and then wipe them and create an image to be burned to DVD for quick reloads.... I know Winnow has mentioned some programs in the past, but after searching for 45 minutes I couldnt find thier names.

Ghost is about all you need.

I researched this recently and ended up getting Acronis, True Image.

It rocks. It rolls. It's easy, easy, easy, to make backups of your HD and restore them. It also allows you to make an optional hidden boot partion on your HD so you don't need to use a recovery CD if you are restoring the same HD.

Highly recommended.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pr ... trueimage/

What you want to do is make a relatively small boot partition that you install your OS on..maybe 40gb or something (my 36GB Raptor is perfect) so you can quickly make incremental backups of it. The backup of my 36GB HD only takes 17GB so you could probably just rotate three full backups (faster to restore a full backup than an incremental backup)

edit: rewrote a sentence to make things clearer

True Image is awesome.. My setup has a hidden acronis secure zone partition for the images, a 20gb boot partition, and a storage partition. i image only the boot partition and i've done several incremental updates.. you can restore to any point, it has a bootloader which is nice, burns recovery cd or fdd, and is very fast.

ghost sucks the cock!

ghost is so simple - just use ghost...

ive ghosted like a hundred machines with no errors - it is a trustworthy program in my opinion.

Well, one of my HDs crashed a few days ago. I took the opportunity to replace my workhorse 250GB WD drive that handles all incoming newsgroup, DC++, Torrent, encoding, unRAR/ZIP activity, before the files are offloaded to other drives for storage, with a quieter 300GB drive. I also decided to replace my loud 36GB raptor at the same time.

I downloaded a copy of Win XP pro with SP/2 and all updates through 9/13/05 integrated so the OS installation was pretty quick and painless.

Since I got on board late with my Image backups, I decided to do a fresh OS install on a new HD, install all key applications, and then make a nice prestine backup of it all before doing anything too crazy.

So far, so good. I also took the opportunity to make sure all of my key apps were up to date with the latest versions, etc. I'm an old hat at this but it is time consuming and I don't want to do it again so I'll be keeping up with a steady OS partition backup routine of once a month, keeping maybe the last three most recent images. It's so easy to do.

My system is quieter now which made the effort worthwhile but I'd like to recover some data on the crashed/corrupt 250GB drive if possible. Right now, if I click on it in the file explorer, it says the drive is not formatted and asks me if I want to format it. Does anyone have a recommendation for a data recovery app? It doesn't look like the drive is totally fried. It's been spinning 24/7 for the past maybe three years which really isn't that long for a HD but most HD's don't get the heavy duty workout this one got. The only stuff I need to recover is from the past week or two that I hadn't moved over to another drive yet. Of the 220GB of data on the drive, I'd like to recover about 10GB of that.

Winnow, try Acronis Disk Director Suite 9 to recover lost partitions.

Is that typically the problem? (lost partition)

I know there are bad sectors from the failed Acronis Backup attempt right before everything crashed.

Does the Disk Director Suite rebuild the partion while eliminating the bad sectors?

Disk Director didn't cut it but Ontrack, EasyRecovery Professional did the trick! Slick program. It was the only one to even recognize the hard drive and then it identified all the files for retrieval and presented them in the same diretory tree format they were on the disk. I ended up keeping 34GB. It recovers the data and keeps in in the same directory structure inside of whatever HD/folder you choose to save it to.

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

Wow, just looked at the price. 499.00 for this software. I guess it's worth it if you absolutely need something off a corrupt disk.

I hope my endoresment of this fine product here is payment enough!

I've got to add one more post about how nice Acronis True Image is.

I had removed my Raptor but forgot to recover all of my email messages, email addresses, favorites, etc beforehand to copy them to the new drive.

True Images allows you to mount an image as another hard drive. It's incredibly easy and fast to do so. So I have the image of my old Raptor mounted and assigned a HD letter. So nice. the little compresed 21GB image responds as fast as if it were a real drive. It's like I never lost my little Raptor pal. /sniff!

Acronis True Image (version 9 is out now) > Ghost

Great UI, well put together program.