backup made easy?

Hello,
What are your recommendations for a simple backup program. The whole thought of backing up is new to me and I think I need a simple program with simple steps. 4.6GB is what is on my hard-drive as of today. I do not have a tape drive so I would like to use the cdrw
Is this acceptable to use my cdrw for the backup?
Another thought - in the future when I decide to upgrade my mother board, processor etc - will it be possible to load windows and restore the whole system? Is it that simple? ya right.

Thanks in advance
J.
w2k pro sp4

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2236

will span cd's

 

Thanks Kodo, I was under the impression that this type of back-up was not possible. I thought you could only back-up the "data" of a program. Going to their site to read -

J.

 

Norton Ghost is also a great app for that. If you have a copy of Systemworks lying around after the year 2000 you should be set.

 

Ghost requires that you reboot to ghost.

Acronis doesn't ..

 

sorry don't quite follow ya.....

i restored a ghost image today with 2002 and I had set it to where the boot info was on the cd itself....

of course, have to have a boot disk for cdrom drivers if worse comes to worse and you dont have an operating system installed at all when you want to restore a backup, but thats not really a big deal.

im sure your option is better (and most likely cheaper than norton), but i was just saying if he has sysworks, he doesn't have to look very hard

 

Ghost has difficulty with ripping to an image while the OS is loaded. It makes you reboot to the "DOS" ghost gui and then it images. WIth acronis, you don't need to do this. You can burn it while the OS is up.

 

Ooh ok I got you. Yeah, w/ ghost you need to make a boot disk just for burning.

sorry for the confusion

 

Just a note on Acronis:

I've been using the TrueImage Verifier Tool with TI 6, build 350, but the verifier function is built in to Version 7. A single click scans the image for identity with the source for randomly selected files and folders, so you can be certain that the image is solid.

Anybody who's using TI 6 and not planning to upgrade can still get the standalone Verifier Tool for V6 at
http://www.acronis.com/files/support/CheckImage.exe, but not for long, I'd guess.

Version 7 is almost ready, and upgrades aren't that expensive.