Looking for software to back up my C drive image

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evident

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
12,130
749
126
I am looking for something that will help me reduce the time it takes for me to get a fresh install of windows back on my system.

Installing windows xp and all essential programs takes a decent amount of time and gets old and tiresome, especially when having to do it alot to troubleshoot problems.

Are there any programs I can use to basically do a bit-for-bit copy of my C drive right after i install windows, drivers, essential s/w like office, etc... , dump it somewhere, maybe an external HD reserved as a "golden image"

I tried to use drive image xml but that was a complete disaster. it would copy my files over, but i could never boot off the drive. Norton ghost im not a fan of, since I have to sort of install that and have it run in the background.

with linux all i had to do was pop another HD in, do a DD and bam i get a the original image. is there a way i can do this in windowsland? is there a way i can do this without any software?

in summary
-I want to install windows, office, opera and drivers, then i want to save that to another HD, to restore just in case i ever need to "reformat". I don't necessarily want a rolling backup that backs up my C drive every night or anything..
 
C

ChAoTiCpInOy

Diamond Member
Jun 24, 2006
6,442
1
81
No, you can make it so that you boot to TI and then it'll image and put it on that other drive.
 
Rottie

Rottie

Diamond Member
Feb 10, 2002
4,795
2
81
Originally posted by: evident
Originally posted by: mechBgon
Try Acronis TrueImage :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

doesnt TI always run in the background though?
Click to expand...

I believe it does I looked up task manager it does have two for schedule back up and monitoring hard drive. but you wont even see anything slowdown anyway.
I love my TI...the best!
 
N

nordloewelabs

Senior member
Mar 18, 2005
542
0
0
last week i used the free and open source "SystemRescueCD" (http://www.sysresccd.org) to backup my Win2000 partition. worked fine.

first you use "Ntfs-3g" (Command Line) to mount a partition of any of your hard drives to serve as storage for the image you will be creating. then, you launch "Partimage" (GUI) to create the image. Partimage can also be used to restore an image to the hard drive. according to the documentation, the resulting images are perfect as long as the imaged drive inst severely fragmented.

btw, i've used the free "DriveImage XML" from inside a (free) "BartPE" disc several times. very fast and reliable.


 
D

Davegod

Platinum Member
Nov 26, 2001
2,874
0
76
If you have a maxtor or seagate drive you can freely download maxblast/diskwizard which does this. IIRC it uses Acronis. I used it when swapping harddrives and it worked perfectly.
 
BlueAcolyte

BlueAcolyte

Platinum Member
Nov 19, 2007
2,793
2
0
What brand hard drive do you have? Also, have you tried running True Image while in Windows?
 
evident

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
12,130
749
126
western digital

i boot to my raptor and have a 6400AAKS as storage. this seems to be a known issue. has anyone else encoutnered this problem? I have a feeling it's becuase the sata drives are booting in AHCI mode.... damn it. nothing in this world is easy
 
mc866

mc866

Golden Member
Dec 15, 2005
1,410
0
0
Acronis FTW, great program, though I have never saved an image to a bootable disc so I'm not sure how well that works but I've had great results booting to the Acronis boot disc and restoring from there, or restoring directly from windows.
 
evident

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
12,130
749
126
Originally posted by: mc866
Acronis FTW, great program, though I have never saved an image to a bootable disc so I'm not sure how well that works but I've had great results booting to the Acronis boot disc and restoring from there, or restoring directly from windows.
Click to expand...

i'm having trouble booting to the acronis boot disk. It keeps giving me that error! it seems like it's a known issue and i asked acronis support for help. apparently they give away an alternate ISO that solves this problem. don't know why they just don't put it on their website.
 
mc866

mc866

Golden Member
Dec 15, 2005
1,410
0
0
Originally posted by: evident
Originally posted by: mc866
Acronis FTW, great program, though I have never saved an image to a bootable disc so I'm not sure how well that works but I've had great results booting to the Acronis boot disc and restoring from there, or restoring directly from windows.
Click to expand...

i'm having trouble booting to the acronis boot disk. It keeps giving me that error! it seems like it's a known issue and i asked acronis support for help. apparently they give away an alternate ISO that solves this problem. don't know why they just don't put it on their website.
Click to expand...

Hmmm that's odd, I've never had any problems booting to the Acronis disk I create from the program, I've been using it since version 7. So you tried going into TI, tools -> create bootable rescue media? I usually just burn from this option but I know you can create an iso from here too. This is a stupid question but did you make sure to set your BIOS to boot to CD first?

Edit:

Also do you need to boot to the disk? You can do most all functions from windows, it just requires a restart to complete.
 
evident

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
12,130
749
126
Originally posted by: mc866
Originally posted by: evident
Originally posted by: mc866
Acronis FTW, great program, though I have never saved an image to a bootable disc so I'm not sure how well that works but I've had great results booting to the Acronis boot disc and restoring from there, or restoring directly from windows.
Click to expand...

i'm having trouble booting to the acronis boot disk. It keeps giving me that error! it seems like it's a known issue and i asked acronis support for help. apparently they give away an alternate ISO that solves this problem. don't know why they just don't put it on their website.
Click to expand...

Hmmm that's odd, I've never had any problems booting to the Acronis disk I create from the program, I've been using it since version 7. So you tried going into TI, tools -> create bootable rescue media? I usually just burn from this option but I know you can create an iso from here too. This is a stupid question but did you make sure to set your BIOS to boot to CD first?

Edit:

Also do you need to boot to the disk? You can do most all functions from windows, it just requires a restart to complete.
Click to expand...

Yup, i've tried it from in the software and yup in the bios boot to cd. I figured booting directly to the disk would be the cleanest way of recovering to the backed up image of windows, right?
 
mc866

mc866

Golden Member
Dec 15, 2005
1,410
0
0
It is the cleanest but you can do it from windows too, it's easier that way and it's the same process. The only time I've found the need for the boot disc is during cloning or if you can't even boot to windows.
 
evident

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
12,130
749
126
what is the difference between cloning vs creating the backup image? does cloning clone the entire HD, all partitions, etc?
 
mc866

mc866

Golden Member
Dec 15, 2005
1,410
0
0
Cloning takes everything on a drive and puts it on another. An application where you may need this is for instance if you had a 40 gb c drive and you were running out of space you could clone it over to a much larger drive, it actually moves all of the programs and data in place to the other drive. Acronis does the work for you and once the clone is complete it will set the new drive as the boot drive. The backup image is just a 1:1 snapshot of the complete drive you want to back up, if I remember correctly you can only restore images to the drives you created them on. So if you had an image of your c drive you couldn't restore it to the drive you setup as e unless the drive was identical. Once the image is created you can completely restore the drive to the state it was in when you captured this snapshot. I use the Acronis task scheduler to run a backup of my c drive once a day and also once a week so I have redundant backups in case of any failures or virus/malware. Hope that makes sense.
 
corkyg

corkyg

Elite Member | Peripherals
Super Moderator
Mar 4, 2000
27,370
240
106
Cloning creates a completely duplicate drive, partitions and all. Just swap and go. A backup image requires restoration. I have always preferred the clone function. All four of my machines have duplicate drives ready to go via Acronis TI's clone function. Note: In Vista you must use TI version 11, build 8053 in order to have a bootable clone without a minor repair to the boot sector.

 
evident

evident

Lifer
Apr 5, 2005
12,130
749
126
hmmmm...

When trying to boot from created media with true image 11 and drivecleanser
i get "No configuration file found" error. Interestingly enough, when trying to boot with true image echo workstation boot media, i am able to boot all the way to the network install part. Also, when booting with just the drivecleanser and without the true image home 11 in the rescue media, i am able to get to the GUI.

I tried contacting acronis tech support a week ago and have not heard a response to where to download an ISO, still haven't gotten a word from them.

i'm gonna give true image echo a shot... what to you guys thing of the echo? the rescue media cd for echo requires a network interface thingy, so i need another computer to log into the one i want to recover and do what i need to do
 
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