Disk imaging recommendations

For the last few years I've been using Powerquest Drive Image v5 run from a
network share (after booting with floppy and NDIS drivers) to backup my
windows machine over the network. Both the create and restore operations
can be done without running or installing support in the OS, which I like.
I'm reluctant to use software that images from the running OS. Drive Image
v5 supports up to 80GB hdd and a new disk on order will be 160GB. So I need
a new backup application, one that:

Supports hdd's at least 160GB.
No OS installation necessary.
Runs using DOS/linux boot cd/floppy environment (ATM I use Bart N2U network
boot floppy) and can run the backup program from a network share.
Handles bad sectors/lost clusters as gracefully as possible.

Any recommendations appreciated.

Thanks.

On 07/01/2007 in message
<45a0d378$0$8759$(E-Mail Removed)> Dean wrote:

>Any recommendations appreciated.

I keep my data separate from the OS and run SmartSync Pro and SyncBackSE
each night to back up (a) to a separate HD and (b) to a NAS. They can both
run from a command line so they are set up in a batch file which XP runs
at 01:30 each day.

How much data needs backing up? Is it kept separate from the OS? How often
do you need to back it up? Do you really need to back up the OS as well?

--
Jeff Gaines Damerham Hampshire UK
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who do binary and those
who don't.

On 7 Jan 2007 11:27:13 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

>On 07/01/2007 in message
><45a0d378$0$8759$(E-Mail Removed)> Dean wrote:
>
>>Any recommendations appreciated.
>
>I keep my data separate from the OS and run SmartSync Pro and SyncBackSE
>each night to back up (a) to a separate HD and (b) to a NAS. They can both
>run from a command line so they are set up in a batch file which XP runs
>at 01:30 each day.
>
>How much data needs backing up? Is it kept separate from the OS? How often
>do you need to back it up? Do you really need to back up the OS as well?

All data is held on network drives and backed up independently on the linux
host with tar. What I want is a backup solution that supports compressing
an NTFS OS partition to a disk image over the network. I have plenty of NAS
to store the image. Typically a 50% used 15GB partiton will, with
compression, only occupy about 3.5GB.

I want imaging software that runs from a boot disc (preferably a floppy)
that allows me to easily customize network support. At the moment I use a
Bart NU2 boot floppy with all necessary NDIS network drivers for all my
PC/NIC combinations. So I just boot a windows PC off it, select the NIC
driver, it then mounts a network share (from the linux server above) and I
run Drive Image from the net share. This has proven to be a very quick and
reliable setup for me. The problem now is that I want to install larger
hdd's and the Drive Image v5 DOS program only handles <=80GB disks.

AIUI recent incarnations of disk imaging applications (Ghost, Drive Image
Acronis etc) don't seem to offer image creation from a boot floppy/cd - only
the image restore. The backup _has_ to be done by installing the software
and running a backup on live filesystems. This is what I want to avoid.

On 7 Jan 2007 11:27:13 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

>On 07/01/2007 in message
><45a0d378$0$8759$(E-Mail Removed)> Dean wrote:
>
>>Any recommendations appreciated.
>
>I keep my data separate from the OS and run SmartSync Pro and SyncBackSE
>each night to back up (a) to a separate HD and (b) to a NAS. They can both
>run from a command line so they are set up in a batch file which XP runs
>at 01:30 each day.
>
>How much data needs backing up? Is it kept separate from the OS? How often
>do you need to back it up? Do you really need to back up the OS as well?

Sorry I forgot to anser the last question!
The reason I back up the whole OS is it's alot less hassle than using system
restore. I turn that off completely and if something goes amiss with
windows, I restore the entire image over the network. Takes about 15
minutes.

On 07/01/2007 in message
<45a10797$0$8728$(E-Mail Removed)> Dean wrote:

>Sorry I forgot to anser the last question!
>The reason I back up the whole OS is it's alot less hassle than using
>system
>restore. I turn that off completely and if something goes amiss with
>windows, I restore the entire image over the network. Takes about 15
>minutes.

The only imaging apps I know are Ghost, Drive Image and Acronis True
Image, I don't use them so I am not in a position to make a
recommendation. Vista has it built in and it would only cost a small
fortune to 'upgrade'.

What about asking in uk.comp.misc or one of the Linux groups?

--
Jeff Gaines Damerham Hampshire UK
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who do binary and those
who don't.

On 8 Jan 2007 09:31:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

>On 07/01/2007 in message
><45a10797$0$8728$(E-Mail Removed)> Dean wrote:
>
>>Sorry I forgot to anser the last question!
>>The reason I back up the whole OS is it's alot less hassle than using
>>system
>>restore. I turn that off completely and if something goes amiss with
>>windows, I restore the entire image over the network. Takes about 15
>>minutes.
>
>The only imaging apps I know are Ghost, Drive Image and Acronis True
>Image, I don't use them so I am not in a position to make a
>recommendation. Vista has it built in and it would only cost a small
>fortune to 'upgrade'.
>
>What about asking in uk.comp.misc or one of the Linux groups?

Cheers. I have used partimage. It worked well but its support for NTFS is
experimental. Backing up any linux system is alot easier. I avoid imaging
and just use tar, then for recovery I repartiton and reformat as I choose
and just extract the files via the filesystem. This approach is more
flexible but impossible with NTFS, imaging seems the only way :-(

The last version of ghost to do backup from floppy is v8/2003. I'm trying
to find out whether that version supports partitions formatted under winXP
and disks >=160GB.

On Sun, 07 Jan 2007 14:44:52 +0000, Dean <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>AIUI recent incarnations of disk imaging applications (Ghost, Drive Image
>Acronis etc) don't seem to offer image creation from a boot floppy/cd - only
>the image restore. The backup _has_ to be done by installing the software
>and running a backup on live filesystems. This is what I want to avoid.
>
Well actually I do just that using Acronis, but the program that does
the boot disk creation (boot CD actually) runs under Windows, and you
install the imaging software under Windows. However, this can be
removed once the CD is created, and the machine can be booted off it
to create/restore the image over the network.

You can even use something like Hiren's Boot CD and the boot CD is on
that (latest version too I think).

Andrew.