Please recommend good Backup Software for XP!

[thatsright]

I have Windows XP Pro SP1a. I have two physical Hard Drives. My C:\ Primary Partition has about 11GB of data on a 18GB Partition. My other 4 partitions contain my games and other files. But I really only backup my C:\ drive every 2-3 months using the built in Windows XP Backup program. I start off with a Full Copy of all used data on C:\ drive. Then on subsequent Backups I use incremental backups.

What I'm looking for is a good, relatively inexpensive backup program so that when I do a recovery of my Primary Partition (maybe after a HD failure), I DON'T have to install XP first, and then the Backup Software, and only after this can I restore my backup.

Something so that I can create a backup image(?), and then in DOS mode use a recovery disk to restore my backup primary partition image to the new C:\ drive

Anyone know something like this, maybe with a free trial?

Thanks

 

[Robor]

Sounds like Ghost would be a good solution for you. With 2 physical drives all you'd have to do is boot the system with a boot disk (can be created with the boot disk wizard) and dump an image of your primary drive to your backup drive. To do a restore simply boot the system with the same disk and dump your good backup image over your primary drive.

 

[slipONflange]

I use Acronis True Image 8.0 and am very happy with it. They have a free trial you can download. Works great and has saved me twice. Boot disk worked perfect and there was no need to reinstall windows. True Image and Ghost were the two I found the most postive feed back on but went with TI8 because I don't care for Symantec.

Edit: I also have two HD, with multiple partitions and works with SP1 and SP2.

 

[Blain]

When cloning a HD, are there any "recovery" type steps to go through...
or just slap in the new HD as a master and go?

 

[jmorrell]

Drive Image 7.0 is well worth the money. It images your hard drive from within Windows without having to reboot. The software CD is also an XP boot CD that loads a small version of XP with network drivers and USB drivers so you can repair your drive by recovering an image from another drive, be it another internal hard drive, external hard drive, CD, or DVD. Drive Image 7.0 has saved my bacon on several occasions. Symantec recently bought the maker of Drive Image, and has incorporated that technology in their new version of Ghost (I believe it's version 9). You may be able to find copies of Drive Imge 7 still for sale on the web.

 

[Smilin]

With NTBackup in XP you should be using ASR. It allows you to perform a reinstall + system state restore in one step. See help files.

 

[thatsright]

Originally posted by: Smilin
With NTBackup in XP you should be using ASR. It allows you to perform a reinstall + system state restore in one step. See help files.

Well I'm sort of looking for something that doesn't require a re-install even if its a small job.

Anyone have any more ideas?