Drive Imaging, what's best?

[Moffat Cafe]

Acronis Drive Image 2010 or Partition Wizard 5.0 ?

 

[thedosbox]

Whatever is freely downloadable from the drive manufacturers site.

 

[MTDEW]

Of the two the OP has mentioned, i'd stick with Acronis.
I use it for all my backups and its been flawless for me when imaging/restoring from a boot disc.

 

[Whisper2]

I agree with MTDEW. I have been using Acronis 2010 since last October and it works very well. You can run it from the DVD, or install it if you want more of an automated "big bother" approach.

Previously, I had used Norton Ghost for about ten years, but it would not work with AHCI or the Gigabyte implementation of the P55 (I suspect it was the AHCI). The earlier versions of Acronis would not work either.

I tried several of the free programs but Acronis was superior enough to spend $30.

 

[corkyg]

Of the two the OP has mentioned, i'd stick with Acronis. I use it for all my backups and its been flawless for me when imaging/restoring from a boot disc.

Agree. And for partitioning, etc., I highly recommend Acronis Disk Director.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Personally I like Macrium Reflect.

You can get a free version here to try it out:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

 

[thedosbox]

Of the two the OP has mentioned, i'd stick with Acronis.
I use it for all my backups and its been flawless for me when imaging/restoring from a boot disc.

In Western Digital's case, they offer a version of Acronis gratis.

Drive Image Backup - The long-term usage of the Drive Kit software will be to provide full drive image backups of a source drive at any time. Backup drive images will be stored as a file, which can be copied to any direct attached drive, network attached storage drive or optical media (CD/DVD).

 

[Whisper2]

thedosbox is correct. WD does offer a free version that is based on Acronis Home 2009; however, this version will not detect my two WD drives that are controlled with AHCI. The 2010 version is the only one that will detect them -- unfortunately, WD does not offer it, so I had to spend $30.

 

[holden j caufield]

I like clonezilla. Free regardless of what hd you have

 

[homercles337]

For mirroring a whole drive after a fresh install i use the Win7 backup utility, for weekly incremental back up i use GFI, for mirroring + striping i use RAID0+1.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

+1 for acronis

 

[Modelworks]

Be wary of acronis 2010 and windows 7 the acronis forums are loaded with problems. I tried to restore a win7 system with it and it just hanged the system at boot and the acronis software would not even load.

2009 was good, but 2010 has issues.

If you just want an image of the drive that you can mount with any virtual cd program then check out this:
http://roadkil.net/program.php/P12/Disk%20Image

Very small program, about 400KB. Pick the drive and where you want it stored or pick the image and where you want it restored to.