Looking for Back-up and clone softwares for PC

[eduawilde]

I am setting up a system and looking for PC softwares for mirroring over network for images,
as well as clone for bootdrives for internal SATA drives.

Please let me know what you guys are using and if there are problems with the softwares. 
I read there are problems with Norton Ghost - any suggestion?

Thanks a bunch,
Edua

[danaltick]

Edua,

I'm on a PC and I use two products that to-date have worked well for me.  One is an imaging product called TrueImage www.acronis.com, and the other is a backup utility called Genie-Soft Backup Manager www.genie-soft.com.  If you search the forum, you can find more info.

Dan

[DJ Webb]

2brightsparks' SyncBack SE (or free) is an excellent bit of kit and does all my backing up.

[billcampbell]

Dan,
can you image your disk to an external USB HD with True Image and make a boot disk? Looking for software that would work at home for desktops and also protection for Laptop when on the road. I would like to have an external boot disk that is a duplicate of the Laptop disk that I could boot from if the HD goes down while I am travelling. Looked at acronis.com and couldn't tell from their site if software would do this.

Bill

[danaltick]

Bill,

I have not done that, but yes you should be able to do that.  However, you should boot to your Acronis boot CD then restore your image from your external USB drive using the Acronis boot loader software.

Dan

[Mick]

Microsoft does not support USB hard drives as boot devices. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

[peterkrogh]

Neither does Apple.  I guess it's likely to be a structural issue with USB, but that's only a guess.
Peter

[Terence Dodge]

Apple says you can boot from a USB drive. I used Sherlock to search Applecare. "bootable usb drives", results returned below.

"What's New to USB?

Beginning with the Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) and the iMac (Slot-Loading), two new features to USB are most apparent: support for USB audio devices and booting from USB drives.

USB Audio Devices: This includes any device also that supports the Isochronous USB protocol (which are mostly Audio in nature). This includes USB speakers, microphones, and other recording/playback devices.

Bootable USB drives: A storage device such as a SuperDisk, Zip disk, or other USB storage drive can be used to hold a valid system folder and used at startup."

Terence Dodge

[peterkrogh]

Terrence,
Thanks for sleuthing that out.  Last time I tried (on my powerbook) it did not work.  Maybe it's too old.
Peter

[Mick]

It's the Hard Drive that is the problem.  USB Flash drives, CD's, DVD's will work as boot devices in a Window's environment. But not Hard Drives. Go figure?