[brentjroberts]

I was wondering if someone could tell me the best and cheapest way to create an image backup. I occasionally restore my computer to the original state using the recovery disk. But the problem is I have to redo everything that I installed and uninstalled. I was wondering if there was an easy way to make an image of my freshly tweaked recovery system so that when I recover I do not have to redo all the changes and programs I installed. Is there an easy way to just restore the image from a cd or network drive or maybe another partition? What program would be best for what I need. I am running XP pro. Thanks for the help. Brent.

[smax013]

brentjroberts said:

I was wondering if someone could tell me the best and cheapest way to create an image backup. I occasionally restore my computer to the original state using the recovery disk. But the problem is I have to redo everything that I installed and uninstalled. I was wondering if there was an easy way to make an image of my freshly tweaked recovery system so that when I recover I do not have to redo all the changes and programs I installed. Is there an easy way to just restore the image from a cd or network drive or maybe another partition? What program would be best for what I need. I am running XP pro. Thanks for the help. Brent.

Certainly a program that will get recommended by some here on this site will be Acronis' True Image. [~22087] on this forum uses it for this purpose on a regular basis and I will be using it for this purpose on my new computer build.

You will want a second drive to use with it. The best scenario is to buy an additional internal drive that you can clone your main drive to and then either remove the cloned drive for storage or remove the original drive and keep the cloned drive in the computer. You can also do it with external drives, but the advantage of the internal drive is that if you have a problem, you just put it in, boot up the computer with the cloned drive, and re-clone it back to the other drive. With an external drive, you would have to boot off the program's CD/DVD, attach the external drive, and then clone it back to the original drive. Plus, in general, internal drives are cheaper than external drives.

You don't want to use another partition. First of all, I don't believe True Image can clone to another partition. I am pretty such that True Image clones entire drives...not individual partitions (Norton Ghost can do just a partition...it is what I currently use on my older computer...but I don't believe it works with Vista...and does not clone to external drives...at least not the version that I have). The other issue is that if you have the clone on a separate partition on the same drive, if you have a hardware problem with the drive (i.e. the drive physically dies), then you have basically defeated the purpose of doing a backup.

[brentjroberts]

Thanks for the reply. I will probably have to go with the external since I am going to be doing it on a laptop. One question I have is when I clone my laptop drive to my external, will it be a single compressed file so I can just ignore it and use the rest of the space for storage or will it be an exact copy of my drive? I would like to be able to use it for storage also and then just copy the image when ever I want to restore my system. If it is an exact copy then the storage that I put on it would be copied back to my laptop when I restore my system, right? I have also heard that when you create an image of your disk when you restore it the drive has to be the same size as before. So if I make an image of my laptop with an 80 gb drive and then later add a 20 gb partition to my laptop drive. Then I will not be able to restore my drive because it is not the same size or larger. Is this correct? I am new to using images and doing this type of backup and restore so I could use any advice i can get. Thanks again.

[smax013]

brentjroberts said:

Thanks for the reply. I will probably have to go with the external since I am going to be doing it on a laptop. One question I have is when I clone my laptop drive to my external, will it be a single compressed file so I can just ignore it and use the rest of the space for storage or will it be an exact copy of my drive? I would like to be able to use it for storage also and then just copy the image when ever I want to restore my system. If it is an exact copy then the storage that I put on it would be copied back to my laptop when I restore my system, right? I have also heard that when you create an image of your disk when you restore it the drive has to be the same size as before. So if I make an image of my laptop with an 80 gb drive and then later add a 20 gb partition to my laptop drive. Then I will not be able to restore my drive because it is not the same size or larger. Is this correct? I am new to using images and doing this type of backup and restore so I could use any advice i can get. Thanks again.

A lot of this will depend on the program that you use. Here is a link to the manual for True Image. You might want to read through it to get some idea of how it might work. I am not completely sure how True Image works with partitions (as oppose to the overall drive) as I have yet to install my copy and use it...and I have version 10 not version 11. I was under the impression that True Image only worked on overall drives for cloning not individual partitions, but I could be wrong or I could be thinking of version 10. I will potentially have a better idea soon as I will be installing True Image soon to do some cloning on my new computer.