Really silly questions perhaps but I thought I’d ask them.
My PC seems to be blue sceening recently, so I’m going to do a reformat this weekend probably.
However I’m fed up of reinstalling everything all the time after a reinstall. I cant create a disk that installs everything straight off as I have a Dell recovery DVD and not a windows disc.
So I was thinking I may buy a disk cloning software such as Ghost or Arconis. However, I’m not enitrely surte what I need.
I want to reformat, install stuff (like games, Opera, firefox, Office etc) then image the disc so I can revert to that point if anything goes tits up.
However, am I looking at a 1 to 1 copy of do these offer compression?
Also, shouldn’t the linux command dd offer me a poor man’s cloning tool? Hook up an external disc, boot up linux live disc and dd the new copy of windows over? And would these have to be the same size? I have a 500Gb Windows drive but obviously that wont be that full to start!
There are some free versions floating about but I never really played about with them. In general, they’re smart enough to only copy the used parts of the disk, and if you want, to apply compression. So the image will be nowhere near the disk capacity you’ll be glad to hear. Unless you fill it with uncompressable junk first
Very very very very very good software (I use it for ALL the pc’s I build, then if viruses get on peoples pcs, I charge em £40 for a rebuild, take their base unit to my house, re-image it to how it was when I gave it to them, (usually takes about 10 mins (after backing up and virus checking docs/emails etc)), and take it back to them the following day.
I’ve used Acronis Disk Director on a recommendation from someone in TPR (can’t remember who) and I found it to be a superbly polished product. I have been toying with buying Drive Image, but 'cause of my good experience with Acronis I think I will be going for True Image at some stage. It gets good reviews elsewhere.
