What's The Best Program To Clone Your Hard Drive?

[Vinnie]

What's the current consensus as to the best program to create a restore disk to DVDs?

[war59312]

Norton Ghost

[User Needs]

Ghost, Hands down

[unicorn]

Ghost.
If the partition you need to clone is formatted ReiserFS... then BootIt NG or Acronis both make a better job. And BootIt NG is free.
In the case you have no need of network support (like you say, make an image and write it to a DVD) BootIt NG will take care of it just as well as Ghost (and faster and cheaper) also when it comes to NTFS and FATxx partitions.

[wase4711]

Acronis True Image, ESPECIALLY if you have a RAID hard drive setup..

[~*McoreD*~]

Yep, I was going to tell Norton Ghost too.

[Vinnie]

Thanks, I kinda figured Ghost, but I also heard some good reports about Acronis True Image. The drive I want to back up is SATA 250 Gig.

[rikytik]

I generally use PowerQuest Dive Image 7. You can do images without going to DOS. But you have to use a recovery environment cd to restore. Depends on your applicaions and objctives. I found that PowerQuest is more finicky on certain laptops and use Ghost 2003 on laptops, as a rule. PQ Drive Image 7 on he desktops

[wase4711]

what I like about Acronis, besides the fact it works much better than Ghost on RAID setups, is that you can restore off a network backup MUCH EASIER than with GHOST; Ghost tries to install all kinds of network drivers, to enable you to do that, and if you choose the wrong one, its absolutely worthless.

Acronis finds your backup ANYWHERE on the network WITHOUT installing dos type drivers, so if you want to back up off a network, dont bother with that miserable Norton Bloatware..

Sorry guys, I have ditched ALL NORTON products about a year ago, and now my machines have NONE of the issues I used to have with NAV, NSW, GHOST, and all their other bloated software..

wase4711

[unicorn]

You are right about the problems with RAID Ghost. I didn't think about that when I replied.

Like wae4711 I also let go off all symantec/norton utilities a long time ago. When I use Ghost I don't have installed at my drives, I always boot from prepared floppies, or a CD when I don't use the network for transportations.

Then I don't find Acronis that fantastic. First off it isn't 100% stable. Then it is a little slow (compared to BootIt NG) and most bothering of it all - several services are installed and always running. But I guess you can run it entirely off some bootable media - the same way as I use Ghost.

Vinnie: You arent gonna backup 250 GB? Really, that will cost you some DVDs to finish that backup?! I guess you have that drive partitioned and that you carefully choose what you really need to backup?