Hello everyone.
My boss tells me to "Ghost new computers" once they're configured, i.e. create a system image that can be reused for restoration if stuff goes wrong. Ghost is ingrained in his vocabulary, we've been using Symantec/Norton Ghost for a while now. Unfortunately, it's sort of a giant pain in the arse... and our local computer store has stopped selling it, to boot.
I like the ability to schedule backups and I like how 14.0 (the last version I've used) does incremental images. On the other hand, it sometimes screws up the incremental images and starts a new backup set for no reason, and worst of all, the images don't always restore properly - they don't seem to regenerate the boot partition setup that Windows 7 uses.
Are there any alternatives? I'm just looking for something that can reliably image a system, hopefully has some sort of scheduling, and doesn't cost a fortune - $50 a license like Ghost is a good target.
My #1 priority is the ability to take a computer that's died, put a blank hard drive in it, and restore the backup image from somewhere else (preferably network, USB storage also OK) onto the blank hard drive and have a working version of Windows without any screwing around.
PS: The built-in backup in Windows 7 left a bad taste in my mouth when I tried to use it on my home computer. There is some incompatibility between the EFI on my new mainboard and the way Windows boots off the hard drive vs. off the recovery disc - Windows simply would not restore my perfectly-valid image. I'd like something that isn't quite so flaky.
My boss tells me to "Ghost new computers" once they're configured, i.e. create a system image that can be reused for restoration if stuff goes wrong. Ghost is ingrained in his vocabulary, we've been using Symantec/Norton Ghost for a while now. Unfortunately, it's sort of a giant pain in the arse... and our local computer store has stopped selling it, to boot.
I like the ability to schedule backups and I like how 14.0 (the last version I've used) does incremental images. On the other hand, it sometimes screws up the incremental images and starts a new backup set for no reason, and worst of all, the images don't always restore properly - they don't seem to regenerate the boot partition setup that Windows 7 uses.
Are there any alternatives? I'm just looking for something that can reliably image a system, hopefully has some sort of scheduling, and doesn't cost a fortune - $50 a license like Ghost is a good target.
My #1 priority is the ability to take a computer that's died, put a blank hard drive in it, and restore the backup image from somewhere else (preferably network, USB storage also OK) onto the blank hard drive and have a working version of Windows without any screwing around.
PS: The built-in backup in Windows 7 left a bad taste in my mouth when I tried to use it on my home computer. There is some incompatibility between the EFI on my new mainboard and the way Windows boots off the hard drive vs. off the recovery disc - Windows simply would not restore my perfectly-valid image. I'd like something that isn't quite so flaky.
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