Modern Disk Imaging Software

[TwiceSliced]

I'm still stuck back in the days of Norton Ghost 8, booting from a floppy or a CD to image my drives, and I'm noticing that newer software suites from Acronis and Symantec run in the OS. I'm curious as to how these programs go about making an image of a system drive while running from that same drive... Do they lock files? Do they reboot the system and perform the operation before the OS starts?

Also, I have a copy of Veritas Backup Exec 9.1 and I'm having some trouble finding detailed information on it. Does anyone know if I can make disk images with it, or just data backups?

 

[robman_rob]

floppy? what's that?

i've used vista complete pc backup as well as acronis to image drives and it just images it while in windows and I suppose you "shouldn't" be using the disk for other uses while it's doing it.

 

[gud4u]

The two that I've used are Acronis True Image 10 and Terabyte Image for Windows.

Both will backup my OS partition from within Windows. I've restored my OS partition multiple times with both apps. Backup, restore and verify/validate speeds are essentially equal.

Regarding Acronis, TI10 has been excellent for me, but I read a lot of complaint posts about TI11.

Acronis also offer disk-cloning function, unavailable with Terabyte IFW - but all HD vendors offer free HD utility software that will clone HDs.

The Acronis GUI is essentially intuitive, even for first-time users. The Terabyte IFW interface is adequate but a bit cryptic - read the manual.

My experience with both apps is with XP.

Hope this helps!

 

[TechieSooner]

I'm curious as to how these programs go about making an image of a system drive while running from that same drive... Do they lock files? Do they reboot the system and perform the operation before the OS starts?

TrueImage uses triple buffers. It's how it accomplishes it. Seems to work quite well (and with no downtime).
My issue comes with Universal Restore though (restoring to different hardware), haven't gotten that exactly squared away yet (BSOD at times along with a hard drive error, that doesn't seem to effect anything).

But the image, appears to work just fine.

If you are just wanting to do a disk-to-disk clone, I have had good luck (twice now) with free Clonezilla. Offline (boot into it) program though.