Which imaging/cloning suite for my needs?

[nbarb99]

I'm "in the market" for a drive imaging/drive cloning software suite at the moment, and would like some suggestions as to what would best suit my needs.

I'd like something that I can take to someone's machine, boot off a bootable floppy/CD and clone their internal drive to an external USB drive. I know some packages (Ghost?) use a DOS-based boot disk, which makes me wonder how well USB drives would be supported.

BootIt NG looks nice, for the price, but I'm a bit confused as to what the difference is between that package and Image for Windows (from the same developers).

Would a more "prominent" commercial package (Ghost, TrueImage) be better? Or, something entirely different?

 

[corkyg]

TI8The best one out there today is Acronis TrueImage 8. It will auto create a bootable CD to allow you to image and clone independent of Windows - but it does not boot to DOS. It boots to a Linux variant - very cool GUI. It also works within Windows.

 

[nbarb99]

Wow, that does indeed look very powerful. It looks like just what I need Thanks for the link.

 

[imported_Phil]

Yeah, we use Acronis Enterprise Server at work, and it's excellent. I can administer the machines' backup schedules and so forth from my own machine using the remote console

 

[doan]

Originally posted by: corkyg
TI8The best one out there today is Acronis TrueImage 8. It will auto create a bootable CD to allow you to image and clone independent of Windows - but it does not boot to DOS. It boots to a Linux variant - very cool GUI. It also works within Windows.

What he said.

 

[warmachine]

I think trueimage will beat Ghost hands down.
I have used ghost for years till I tried to ghost to a USB drive
OMG I think the war will be over before this gets done cloning
so I just got a copy of trueimage haven't used it to clone to a USB drive yet,
but from my research I don't see a problem. And if U would like to use ghost
I think this may help thread on using ghost with USB drive
I will try cloning w/ trueimage and let you know how it works.

 

[WildHorse]

Another alternative for cloning is, if one of your hard drives is a Maxtor, you can also use the free Maxblast3 downloadable from Maxtor's site.

I know that probably won't fit nbarb99's situation, but thought I'd toss that in for benefit of others who browse this thread who it might help.

 

[dunkster]

I use 'Image for Windows' and 'Image for DOS' combo.

Image for Windows will image any partition, but requires the free Phylock utility to image an active partition (Windows).

Image for DOS is required to restore an active partition (Windows).

Image for DOS will do it all, but it's much slower than IFW when creating an image. Speed comparison (Backup a 4GB Windows partition image to single DVD media with byte-for-byte image verification):
- IFW takes 15 minutes (12 minutes for image-creation, 3 minutes for verification).
- IFD takes 38 minutes (20 minutes for image-creation, 18 minutes for verification).

Outstanding software. The Terabyte forum is here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/webnews.html

Hope this helps!

 

[Dorkenstein]

Cool, I've been looking at this one and Paragon.