Need advice on good backup software for hard drive

[bruincal]

Hi,
I need to backup my 40GB drive. Its filled to capacity, totalling about 37GB of data on a single bootable NTFS partition. I need to back it up onto a USB2.0 hard drive that is formatted FAT32. The thing is, I will not be using this backup to restore the image later. I will only be extracting files from the backup later.
I tried using Norton Ghost 2003 to create a Ghost image since I knew that I could use Norton Ghost Explorer later to extract single files. However, when I try to create the image, I get the error message "Your Virtual Partition cannot be created. Your disk may be too fragmented. Run defragmenter and try again." I launched Windows Disk Defragmenter in WinXP and defragmented the drive, and then also used Norton Speed Disk 2002 to defragment again. I still get that error message.
So, I decided to try the Backup utitily built into Windows XP Pro. It starts creating the backup file into my USB2.0 hard drive. However, at 4GB, the Backup utility quits with an error. Because the Backup utility cannot span the backup over several files, it cannot create files larger than 4GB on my FAT32 formatted 80GB UBS2.0 drive.

Does anyone know a good way to backup this drive? I need the software to be able to:
- backup to a file
- span over multiple files (since I'm limited by the FAT32 limit of 4GB per file)
- extract single files from the backup

I know that Nero and NTI BackupNow! can backup the entire partition to CD's, but you can't extract single files and you have to restore the whole drive at once.


Thanks!!!

 

[bruincal]

Oh yeah, I forgot - my system specs and OS:

Windows XP Professional, SP1 and all patches
Pentium 4 2.0 GHz
Intel 850MV motherboard
256 MB RDRAM
40 GB HDD
100 GB HDD
DVD/CDRW
USB2.0/FireWire


Thanks!

 

[Smilin]

the built in backup program is pretty decent but I'm not sure how it does file spanning, if at all.

I recently backed up my stuff to DVD and I did it using WinRAR. If you create rar files rather than zip it gives you the option to specify the file size. I just ran winrar and dumped all my 20 gigs or so of mp3's into an archive (I did store, no compression since they were mostly compressed anyway) but I set winrar to break the archive into 4gig chunks so I could put them on DVD.
The whole process sounds a bit clumsy but it actually works pretty well. You can also get really insane compression out of winrar if you set it to maximum compression and solid archives. Winrar also has that nifty "background" feature that lets it run at nearly idle cpu priority in case you feel like playing a 3d shooter while it compresses.

I also lost a shitload of data in the great crash of 2002 when I found my ghost image had an error and I couldn't pull anything out of it with ghost explorer. I guess the lesson learned was it's worth the extra time it costs to check that 'verify' checkbox ...so now you know if you decide to stick with ghost somehow

hope it helps