Image software
Submitted: Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 14:36
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Austravel
Hi,
I always take my laptop when travelling and to date just do document backups. However after just spending 3 days rebuilding it from scratch I'm sick of it. Do you know of any easy freeware back up/image software available?
I'm after basic image back up, so hit a button and it backs up every thing on the hard drive/s. If I need to restore I want it to be just as easy. I'm looking at Ping but on first glance it doesn't look that easy.
Thanks
Reply By: bruce - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 15:30
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 15:30
Type in ...gizmos freeware..in google , you will have a ball...cheers
AnswerID:
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:17
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:17
Thanks will check it out.
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Reply By: mikehzz - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 16:08
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 16:08
Easeus Disk Copy will make an image of hard drive and is free
AnswerID:
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:17
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:17
Thanks will give it a try.
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Reply By: Member - Allan B (QLD) - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 16:55
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 16:55
To where are you backing-up these files?
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:17
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:17
An external hard drive.
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Follow Up By: Member - Allan B (QLD) - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:22
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:22
Ah, good. I thought you were backing-up to your computer hard drive. Can never see the value in that!
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Reply By: Member - Graham H (QLD) - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 16:57
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 16:57
If you want a bootable backup or complete restoration Norton Ghost is the best.
It will restore a C drive back to as it was at the time you made the image.
The best thing you could do is buy a 1or 2tb drive and schedule a backup at a certain time daily or weekly or whenever and it will do it automatically.
It will NOT however restore boot partitions so if you format the drive it wont restore it like Nortons will.
Not quite sure what you want but thats the options. If you use Nortons 9 dont have a USB drive connected when you do the restoration. I did and it took me a month to fix the thing.
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:20
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:20
I do want a complete restoration so a bootable back up. I have a large external hard drive and this is where I want the image to go to. I don't use nortons not really sure why that's an issue.
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Follow Up By: Member - Graham H (QLD) - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:39
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:39
Made a mistake It was when I added a SATA drive and Nortons 9 really got in a twist. LAter versions may be Ok but had it so used it
Wasnt till I took the machine home and mucked around I figured out what was wrong
.
I guess with a lappy it wont be a problem.
What do your IT guys say they would have some software surely and know more than us "Amateurs"
Nortons will copy a complete drive to a Partition on a big drive and copy it
back again later but you will have to back all data up since the copy and add it
back after the restoration.
Cheers
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 20:12
Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 20:12
Will check with our IT guys and let you know.
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Reply By: Member - John D, Wandong (Vic) - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 17:02
Reply By: Mandrake's Solar Power- Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 17:32
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 17:32
We use
FS Viewer to download our camera cards to Laptop - Currently we are using
Storejet 250 Gb drives not the laptop drive !!
Once we get home we download to our main PC and retain the original image files on a seperate HDD in the PC - Then when we go on the next trip the Transcend gets formatted and 2 complete copies are retained on the PC at home . At some stage during the cold wet season we also burn the images to DVD .
I know this is not what you asked for - "back-up" software - but a photographers workflow should be a religion of retaining copies on media that should not get corrupted if the main drive collapses and in duplicate ( just in case !!)
Cheers
Steve
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:24
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 19:24
I agree which is one of the reasons for looking at imaging the whole drive. Did you know that for critical data you should recopy your DVD every 3 or so years. I'm told from our IT guys that 3-5 years is all you can safely get from a current DVD unless you use the top quality which will give you up to 7 years.
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Follow Up By: Mandrake's Solar Power- Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 20:09
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 20:09
X-Clone is a good free program which as its name suggests clones any drive - makes a complete copy of any HDD provided the source drive is smaller than the destination HDD .. This is
well worth doing on your main C drive as it copies so that the new drive will actually work as a voot drive !!
Cheers
Steve
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Follow Up By: Mandrake's Solar Power- Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 22:16
Friday, Jan 01, 2010 at 22:16
And we all know what a voot drive is don't we !!!! LOL
BOOT is what I meant - voot is what my fingers decided on !!
Rgds
Steve
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Follow Up By: Blaze (Berri) - Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 13:34
Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 13:34
Austravel, We use Archival DVD's for all our customers backups. They say the last 300 years, I expect them to be little shy of that so advertise them as 100 year life span.
Cheers
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Reply By: Member - extfilm (NSW) - Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 16:28
Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 16:28
Why not use the back up program that came on the external hard drive?
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Follow Up By: Member - Graham H (QLD) - Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 16:37
Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 16:37
Backing up a drive is usually different to Cloning a drive as Ghost does.
There are not a lot of programs that have the ability to completely replicate
every part of a drive so that if your drive crashes you can rebuild it with the
image you have made and it will run as if it had not corrupted.
My WD will backup but not make a useable image.
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Follow Up By: Austravel - Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 20:17
Saturday, Jan 02, 2010 at 20:17
Thanks Graham the latter is what I'm after, a complete bootable back up.
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