HD Imaging Software

[seacue]

I know about Ghost and True Image for Windows XP, etc.

I find a number of free purported alternatives. Are any of them thought to be reliable enough to trust?

Thanks,

bob

[Saab Dastard]

If you have at least one Seagate or Maxtor disk in your system you can download and use Seagate's DiscWizard - it's actually a free version of Acronis True Image. Not the latest, but quite usable.

I've used it a few times, and on other brands of disks as well - basically I installed an old Maxtor disk to qualify. ;)

Might be worth checking if other HD makers offer anything similar.

SD

[AnthonyGA]

I'm suspicious of anything that's free. It's really, really rare to find quality freeware. Writing good software is hard work, and even people who enjoy it usually don't do it for free for very long.

Anyway, TrueImage isn't free, but it's very good value for the money. I've saved and restored entire machines with it on many occasions, and it works very well. These days I just take complete TrueImage backups of my machines, and if a disk fails, I replace it, restore it with TrueImage, and I'm back in business in 20 minutes. For machines that are used by many people, it's also a good way to fight malware—instead of running some intrusive, bloated antivirus package, I just wipe the machine clean with a restore of a virus-free system from time to time (obviously, this is practical only for machines that aren't going to be holding any new files, since the restore puts everything back they way it was before).

I haven't tried Ghost, but since it comes from bloatware specialist Norton, I'm not keen on trying it.

[seanbean]

I must have tried them all over the last few years - have now settled on Acronis and don't think I'll be changing anytime soon. Sometimes you get what you pay for - highly recommended.

[BOAC]

XXClone (free) has worked ok so far.

[Shunter]

I'm suspicious of anything that's free

*sigh*
I take it you're not familiar with this thing called open source?

Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) - end of discussion. I'll never go back to tat like Ghost.

[Saab Dastard]

I'm all for Open Source, and Clonezilla is impressive - however it wouldn't have helped me where DiscWizard did, as one of its limitations is
The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.

TrueImage does allow you to reduce partitions (providing the data size fits), which really was a godsend.

SD

[izod tester]

Partimage does not require the destination partition to be as big or bigger than the partition or drive to be copied. It can be added to any Linux installation if required, although the simplest way to use it is from System Rescue CD.

[seacue]

Thank you all for the comments and suggests so far.

Please keep them coming.

seacue

[seacue]

Any more suggestions?