Hi everyone!
I just would like to know your opinion about software Norton Ghost versus Acronis True Image for copying an entire hard disk (for back-up purposes). One of you (thanks Lukeles) also advised the use of the freeware EaseUs Disk Copy. But this one works in DOS... which is nothing for me (I am not sure I would be able to fish the data back in case of need). Any competitor to the above mentioned softwares? Your opinions are welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Francoise

I would use CasperXP, and nothing else! If you want a true mirror copy including all the XP operating files to work properly, there is no better program than CasperXP. Once you have made a backup of your bootable drive, then the next time you backup that drive again, it will be a very fast backup. It takes me less than 2 minutes to backup about 10gigs of data ( only those files are copied again, that have changed in size, date, time, etc ).

I switched from an Asus motherboard to a gigabyte motherboard,and of course had to do the Repair. I thought that would fix everything, but it has not. A program that came with the Gigabyte board cal

Both are the leaders in the field. Both are able to be used for home use. Some versions of Ghost might have a bit more enterprise use but that still depends on you basic needs. Do you need to cast an image over a lan or boot a dead computer? I have used ghost for years and am kind of stuck on it but I have heard great reports about Acronis.

There a plenty of things on Linux live cd's that could be used for free. There is a steep learning curve on them. There was a demo that was offered on the ultimate boot cd for windows that works. Might start with a UBCD4Win disk anyway along with a backup scheme.

After years of using Ghost, a friend suggested I check out Acronis.

The first time I tried a restore with Acronis, half way through I got an "image corrupted" error message and the partition that I was trying to restore became unallocated disc space. I had to pull the HDD and slave it to another computer so that I could use disc managment to create a partition and format it. I then used Ghost to restore the partition.

I'm not sure if I'll be using Acronis in the future.

I had a similar experience with Acronis as Badboy. I will stay with the dos version of ghost. Simple and about 3x faster than the windows version.

http://computervitals.com/

Having been an ardent Ghost user for many years I switched to Acronis about 18 months or so ago because I wanted to image from within XP.

Apart from some possible incompatibility issues with images made with older versions I have found it completely reliable and have had no problems whatsoever.

I may be mistaken but I have heard that the current iteration Ghost, (v10 is it now?), is not Ghost at all but a version of Drive Image.

I second JohnFL with Casper XP. It is a great program--have used it for 3 years and have absolutely NO complaints..it is very user friendly and has a nice interface with an easy to use cloning scheduler and all the frills. Check it out--you will not be sorry!

Hello guys,
I use Acronis True Image and it seems to me very reliable software. This program is perfect for ctreating full HDD backup, I've been using it for 2 years and I've never had any problem with it!

With Casper XP, is it possible to copy a slave drive on another system across a network to a USB external drive on my local PC?

Hi chrismr --from their website http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/ and under faq this is what they state: Can Casper XP be used to copy a network drive?
While Casper XP supports copying from mapped network drives (remote shares) to a local drive, it does not support copying to mapped network drives from a local drive.

hope this helps