Machine Backup – Imaging

When it comes to backups, I make it easy to do with my laptop. All my data files (Documents, Emails, PowerPoint files, Source Code, Music, Photos, etc.) are stored on a separate partition (it’s become a compulsion for me over the years to keep this partition as the D: drive (D:) and name it Data). So I normally XCopy (or Robocopy) the entire D-Drive to my external USB Drive or to my Office Network Share periodically.

But when it comes to the OS Partitions, it is not so easy. You cannot simply copy the OS partition files; you need to do what is called as “Imaging” or “Ghosting”. When you take an image of a partition or an entire hard drive, a copy of it (sector by sector) is written into an image file, which you can restore to get your partition/HDD back exactly as it was before. Though writing a program to do this is not technically so difficult, especially if you can boot into DOS and you are able to write decent C & DOS Interrupt programs, most of the commercial products in the name of a simpler UI and running from within the Windows GUI have made it very complex and pricey.

Anyways, for several years, the only popular product to do this was Norton Ghost (still available) – the number of machines/OS setups that Ghost has saved for me is not small. Nowadays, I prefer Acronis True Image. I recently bought a copy of their Home Edition and tried it on my laptop; it took less than 20 minutes to back up my C: drive (Windows XP, 20GB total, 11GB used) to my external USB Seagate 100GB drive. It compressed pretty well, getting the image file size down to about 5.68 GB.