• Storage & Archiving

  PC Boot drive Image or Back up?

  Posted by Brad Leigh on November 25, 2011 at 5:20 am

  Hello
  I know this question might seem too simple but I need to ask it. I own 3 computers 2 PC’s and one MAC. I have a PC XP laptop that I use at home to do animation and prep sessions for my larger PC at work.
  I noticed it was running slow. So I upgraded the RAM and put in a clean faster HD. I spent 5 hours making a beautiful boot drive with all software installed and prefs set. Now I’m thinking like A MAC guy, make a disc image of my 5 hours of work. I tried Acronis and got really mad seeing it grind away on a later boot. It was updating the Image, I DON”T want that! I could find no pref’s to keep it from doing that, so I uninstalled it. I don’t like norton. NTBackup looks close, but I don’t see how to restore without an OS, if command line promps are used they seemed very confusing. Is there anything simple that will image a boot Drive only when I run the application, then let me boot of a Drive or CD and run the application to restore off an external HD? My laptop seems to support booting from USB
  Thanks in advance!
  Brad

  i7 2600 3.4 Ghz 8Gig Ram , Win 7 Pro, Vegas Pro 10

  Todd Perchert replied 14 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Todd Perchert

  November 30, 2011 at 5:43 pm

  XP? You could get XXClone (free) and clone the drive. I’ve successfully used XXClone on several XP systems. There is an option for making your cloned drive bootable as well. For XP I find this easiest. Since then you can drop the drive in, tell the PC to boot to that drive and you are working again after a drive failure. Whereas if you image, you have to write all that data from the image to a new drive, but you can do that easily over a network connection or DVDs. So it depends on what you are really most comfortable with.
  TC

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