Making an image

[NC]

How does imaging software work? Does Acronis or Ghost make an image of the entire hard drive and then how do you write then image back to disc? If the disc has crashed and it's wiped, the backup image will have to be on another disc.

[adam_chevyss]

I'm not familiar with Acronis, but I'm sure it probably has about the same options as most. You have the option to copy the entire hard drive or just partitions. You could make a seperate partition on your hard drive and copy your primary partition to it. In the event of a problem you could put your ghost disc in and select to copy partition to partition. So backup to primary.

[humanity]

Make / move the image to another physical drive (or somewhere else on a network) or create bootable recovery media. Restore from another physical drive / network / bootable disc(s).

[RealBeast]

How does imaging software work? Does Acronis or Ghost make an image of the entire hard drive and then how do you write then image back to disc? If the disc has crashed and it's wiped, the backup image will have to be on another disc.

Both will do a full disk image and/or specific file backups. I would suggest that you download the free trials for both and see which you prefer. Acronis has a free 15 day trial on True Image 10 and Norton has a 30 day free trial on Ghost 15.

[fluffmonster]

western digital and seagate both have full-disk image migration tools that i think are stripped-down versions of Acronis. Might be worth considering.

[ua549]

AFAIK the Seagate offering included with Sea Tools is a full version of Acronis - just an older release.

[cat5e]

If you have only the original drive and it already crashed you might be in irreversible trouble.

Get the Acronis True Image, install it on another computer and make the Boot CD of it (it is part of the progarm to make Boot CD).

Open the computer and connect a second new Drive temporarily to an empty IDE or SATA (according to what you have).

boot the Acronis CD and choose to clone the original drive to the new one.

The probability that it will clone Ok depends on what happened to the old drive. There is a strong probability that it would not clone correctly, or that it would clone but the new drive wold not work either because of corrupted data from the crash.

Normally most people prepare ahead to such event.

I.e., I have an external Drive that keeps the images of my working drives before they crash. If some thing crashed, then I can Ghost back the backup image to a good drive while booting with the Boot CD.


.

[vertices]

I'm pretty sure the Seagate version of Acronis doesn't include the scheduling options however. It does check to make sure you have at least 1 Seagate drive in your system.