I recently purchased Vantec's NextStar external hard drive enclosure and I put in 200 GB HD in it. I bought this enclosure so that I could back-up my main PC. However, I now need back-up software. I plan to back-up the hard byte for byte so that I will have an indentical copy of the HD in my computer, in the enclosure. My question to you is, what program(s) would you recommend, (or what do you use yourself)? Pro's and Con's would be appreciated. Thanks.
Norton Ghost is pretty good, assuming it's still called that. I've been using that since 3.x/Win 95 days. Pretty good for the money. Otherwise check out WinBackup. I've heard a lot of good things about WinBackup, but Norton Ghost is still what I use.
As the padre says, Norton Ghost (from www.symantec.com), or PowerQuest Drive Image will give you a single "image" file of a partition, very useful if you want to back up your OS. The good ol' Windows NT backup that ships with NT/2k/XP is good for automatically backing up other data on the cheap, but it won't give you a block-for-block copy of your disk - for that you'll need RAID Be warned that relying on a Ghost image could be painful if you've gotta boot into DOS mode to do a restore - finding DOS USB/Firewire drivers will be painful !
