I use Acronis True Image Home to image my C: drive (I just do a straight backup of the files on my D: and E: drive, so I don't need to image that to get back up and running.

I don't know what Tim uses, but with ATI Home, you boot with a CD and then using the interface, you create the image file onto another hard drive. It can be an external USB,external eSATA, external Firewire, or even an internal (different) hard drive. ATI compresses the data (I generally get about 25% compression, since most of the files are binary data, versus easier to compress text). Takes about an hour to do the image (my C: drive has about 150GB on it). You also have an option to break the image file into smaller chunks. I generally choose the DVD size, so I can back them up to individual DVD's, should I choose.

There are other solutions, but ATI is what I've been using successfully for many many years and am very happy with it.

EDIT: Oh, and just a few weeks ago, the diagnostics on my hard drive indicated the drive was going bad. So, before it died, I was able to create an image, pop a new hard drive in, restore the image, and in a matter of a couple of hours was back up and running as if nothing had happened.

Last edited by jford; 06/15/12 12:35 PM.
John

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