Computer Hope

Software => Computer software => Topic started by: johndoe on February 01, 2009, 06:55:44 AM

Title: disc cloning
Post by: johndoe on February 01, 2009, 06:55:44 AM

 im looking to buy some cloning software and done a couple of trials but i have a couple of questions

acronis seems to only be able to clone the whole drive to a whole drive not partition to partition - have i missed something?

i quite liked the speed of spotmau, does faster mean more chance of errors?

can a cloned image be split open in another application to get at individual files?

any other recommendations based on speed accuracy and the ability to open the image up?

i know there are lots of threads on cloning software but they all seem to be just recommendations without the reasons why

Title: Re: disc cloning
Post by: Geek-9pm on February 01, 2009, 12:48:19 PM

There are more clone programs than you can imagine.
Maybe they have cloned each other.
Early versions of Norton Ghost work fine. Just eh user interface is a little hard to understand the first few times you use it.
You can now get Acronis as a free trial. But know that.
My favorite:
http://www.runtime.org/
The product is free and works inside of Windows XP. This means you have to have a backup XP system ready to do a full recovery if you main system fails.
But hat is the way you should work anyhow, IMO.

Other clone software may 'shock' the NTFS and you can get an error message when the restored system comes up.  Because  DriveImage XML works with XP, it avoids the conflicts.

At lot of this stuff is now free. Buy if you want to buy one, try HDClone.
http://www.hdclone.com/
It has a pretty user interface and is warm and woolly.
But even they have a free version!

Title: Re: disc cloning
Post by: mayers57 on February 04, 2009, 04:24:14 PM

I like DriveClone Pro 6

Title: Re: disc cloning
Post by: patio on February 04, 2009, 05:33:52 PM

Quote

Features & Benefits
Snapshot
NEW!
Back up your computer in a mere 10 seconds, regardless of hard drive size! A 120GB hard drive and a 300GB hard drive both back up in 10 seconds.
Universal Restore NEW!

How is this possible in 10 seconds ? ?

Title: Re: disc cloning
Post by: Geek-9pm on February 04, 2009, 05:46:55 PM

Quote

A 120GB hard drive and a 300GB hard drive both back up in 10 seconds.

A drive running at 7200 RPM might read 1200 tracks in 10 seconds not counting the head step time. Many drives today have well over that many tracks.

The Hype is very misleading.

Title: Re: disc cloning
Post by: mayers57 on February 04, 2009, 06:07:59 PM

Well I use it mainly because my systems at work use RAID O and although Acronis and others claim that they backup RAID systems, they don't do it reliably enough for me. Now I just happen to backup a RAID 0 system the other day and restored it to another system. It was approx 8gig and I believe it backed it up in 5min and restored it in 2min. I was impressed with those numbers, dunno about 10secs. I don't see that happening.  But regardless, this DriveClone Pro so far has impressed me, almost to the point where it might replace my copy of True Image. Need to do some more testing.

Title: Re: disc cloning
Post by: mayers57 on February 04, 2009, 06:16:42 PM

One claim that this product makes, which I would love to test out, is that they claim that I can take one of their disk images and import it into VMWare and run it like any of their appliances. This could be amazing if you think about it.