Disk backup

Sharp101

Ok, so I want to back up my current main windows drive occasionally and store it on a portable drive I have. It's about 100 GBs of data I want to backup.

I was thinking that I could get something to Make an Image of my main drive, and put that image on my portable drive.

I remember using Norton ghost back in the day, but I'm not sure if this is ideal for this much data.

Any suggestions?

(In case if matters, which I don't think it should, I'm partitioning the 500GB portable drive in half, one NTFS for PC backup and large files, another fat32 for Mac sharing.)

Jebus314

There are free linux programs that do that I think. dd comes to mind. I'm not sure if this would be a scenario where you could run dd from a live cd but it seems plausible. Mostly I just wanted to remind you that if your portable drive is formatted in FAT32, you can only make single files that are less than 4GB. So if you wanted a single backup image you would have to use a different filesystem. Just something to keep in mind.

Sharp101

Hmm, bootable linux CD is an interesting idea.

Also, the limitations of fat32 suck. But that's the only way to get a mac and PC to both write to the same partition. (See last line of OP)

-edit

I didn't think to look if there were any Windows built in tools I could use. (I'm on vista 64-bit)

Looks like there is a disk image tool here. Is it any good?

RBach

If you don't want to spend any money, Partimage is a Linux tool that works reasonably well. It's a little hard to use if you aren't familiar with Linux, though.

I personally like Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows. Acronis TrueImage is another good one. Both cost money, however, but Image for Windows is pretty reasonably priced IMO.

Also, the Vista/7 Backup tool should work, but I've never used it myself and can't vouch for it.

Topweasel

I am a big believer in TrueImage. You can run it in windows, do incremental s if you want, Heavy compression works well (unlike Ghost), you can password lock it, or even encrypt it with no effort and if you want you can also burn the image to DVD's by having it split every 4.7 GBs.