best backup/clone

what do you guys consider the best backup:image:clone program to make a copy of the hard drive (regardless of cost)

 

Actually, Bill, there isn't one best utility for this.

Seagate provide a utility for 'cloning' your old hard drive to a new larger one with consumer packaged versions of the upgrad drives. This works very simply for simply moving your OS on to a new, larger drive.

I have found the 'copy partition' facility in Partition Magic to be very good and fast.

However, beware, many utilities including PM cannot do Vista.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=168727&highlight=partition+magic

One that can is clone genius from spotmau.

www.spotmau.com

But it is quite slow as it uses a different technique for the cloning.

Some tips for cloning:

Some utilities require you to prepare the target drive first with a partition and perhaps formatting to place the source. Some disregard anything on the target and create new structures.

All utilities benefit from a good cleanup of the source first. Delete unwanted files, do a check disk and perhaps a defrag.
It is very frusting to let the cloning run for say 5 hours to receive an error message 'clone aborted can't read from source'

Whilst you obviously require enough space to copy the files, some utilities only clone to a drive that is as large or larger than the source, others can fit only the used space on a smaller one.

Don't clone to an old drive that has been pensioned off that drive may fail when you most need the copy.

Some utilities (PM and Spotmau and Seagate) will boot from CD and control the cloning outside of Windows.
Some utilities have to be installed in Windows to work, which may not be convenient.

Try to put your source and target drives on different channels as only one device can be active at a time on a individual channel. This greatly speeds cloning. It doesn't matter if they are master or slave (for IDE), that makes no difference.

Once you have created your clone you may have further work to do, eg editing boot.ini, to make you new partition work properly. This is especially true if you are cloning the Windows partition of a drive which also has manufacturers' recovery or control/diagnostic partitions as well.

 

Thanks Studiot this is for a friend that i am asking who is also with Vista, I have paragon but it's not the easiest to use.

I basically wanted to know personal favorites, that SPOTMAU looks interesting and with the promo price could be a good buy.

 

I tried to download a free trial but they don't do one (shame)

 

THANKS David i think i will recommend Acronis to her it seem the most user friendly and she is not PC savvy (just like me)

 

That is a key statement.

Both the programs Halo mentioned can store the 'image' in proprietary format.

You need the proprietary program to 'restore' them.

I normally regard cloning as making a copy of one hard drive or partition on another hard drive so that you can simply unplug the first and replace it directly with the second, without doing any 'restoring'. EG for upgrading to a larger hard drive.

Backup and restore are reverse processes for other (obvious) purposes.

So you need to decide which you mean.

 

Thanks for the heads up Studiot.

It would have been nice to have tried spotmau just to see how it worked.

The reason i suggested a good backup system to her was that she (just like me) is always downloading things so it's a safe way for her to work knowing that if something goes wrong and system restore is not available she can get everything back.

I have used recovery twice already on her machine