Advice on Disk Imaging needed..?

[oc9ine]

Hi,

I used to create my full disk images of my C drive using either Powerquest
Drive Image or Ghost of Fat32 drives which helped a lot because of their
great compression.

Now I have switched to using NTFS on my system. I am using Windows XP SP3
with ntfs on all partitions and I have P4 2.40 ghz with 756 mb RAM.

When I tried to make full disk image of C: drive for backup purpose using
either Ghost 8.0 or Disk Image software. I was not impressed because they
did not compress disk images to a significant level.

I am asking is there any good software which could be used to make disk
images with great compression.

Waiting in positive anticipation.

Oc9ine.

 

[Malke]

Hi,

I used to create my full disk images of my C drive using either Powerquest
Drive Image or Ghost of Fat32 drives which helped a lot because of their
great compression.

Now I have switched to using NTFS on my system. I am using Windows XP SP3
with ntfs on all partitions and I have P4 2.40 ghz with 756 mb RAM.

When I tried to make full disk image of C: drive for backup purpose using
either Ghost 8.0 or Disk Image software. I was not impressed because they
did not compress disk images to a significant level.

I am asking is there any good software which could be used to make disk
images with great compression.

I like Acronis True Image. I use True Image Echo Workstation which is an
enterprise product so it costs a bit more than the home version, but AFAIK
the home version works very well also. You have to go to their site to
compare versions to see which would suit your needs better.

Malke

 

[oc9ine]

Does Acronis true image provide great compression?

oc9ine

 

[R. McCarty]

True Image has selectable compression levels. However, the actual end
result compression depends more on the type of data being processed.
As you perform an image ( or schedule ) you can toggle the compression
level and TI will show the approximate image size and time to process.

In most cases using the maximum compression doesn't yield that much
more size reduction than using the "Normal" value.

 

[Anna]

True Image has selectable compression levels. However, the actual end
result compression depends more on the type of data being processed.
As you perform an image ( or schedule ) you can toggle the compression
level and TI will show the approximate image size and time to process.

In most cases using the maximum compression doesn't yield that much
more size reduction than using the "Normal" value.

I haven't worked with the ATI program in some time, however, based upon my
overall experience with versions 9, 10, & 11 we found that by & large
compression levels ranged from 20% to 25%, i.e., the percentage by which the
data was compressed. So that, as an example, 50 GB of data would be
compressed somewhere between 37 GB to 40 GB.

Our experience also parallels R. McCarty in that there didn't seem to be an
enormous difference whether one chose "Normal", "High", or "Max"
compression.

We also found that there was a serious trade-off in terms of completing the
disk-imaging process depending upon what level of compression the user
chose. Using "Normal" compression for instance, backup time was considerably
reduced in comparison with selecting "High" or "Max" compression levels. As
a consequence we virtually always selected "Normal" compression (the default
as I recall).
Anna

 

[Malke]

Our experience also parallels R. McCarty in that there didn't seem to be
an enormous difference whether one chose "Normal", "High", or "Max"
compression.

We also found that there was a serious trade-off in terms of completing
the disk-imaging process depending upon what level of compression the user
chose. Using "Normal" compression for instance, backup time was
considerably reduced in comparison with selecting "High" or "Max"
compression levels. As a consequence we virtually always selected "Normal"
compression (the default as I recall).
Anna

My experience matches yours and R. McCarty's also. I always select "Normal"
for compression. With the cost of hard drives so low nowadays, if the OP is
running out of room to store his/her images s/he should just get some more
(larger) hard drives.

Malke