How do I make the best HD back-up?

[AnitaPeterson]

So, I finally put together my new SFF machine... and it works perfectly.

Now, before it inevitably starts decaying - like all Windows OS do - I'd like to make a DVD back-up of the system partition, so in case I ever run into trouble, I can restore everything to the way it was at this point.

What is the best program and procedure to do this?

I'm thinking something along the lines of Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, but my question is: how complicated is it to re-transfer the data back to the HD (re-image) afterwards?

 

[CalvinHobbes]

If you have a second hard drive in there you could use that as your image storage drive. If you want to burn the image to DVD either one should work fine. Another option is to leave a partition on your boot drive for the image storage. In my experience it's best to make that partition an extended partition with a logical drive.

 

[bNeta86]

Acronis - Fast / Simple / Clean

And its very easy to reimage the drive once you get tired of the "bloat".

Enjoy

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

I use Ghost. Very easy to reimage.