Backup program

[Daniel Royer]

Can somebody point me to a good simple backup program (to an external
HD), free if possible. But if it's necessary to pay ...

Daniel

 

[John McGaw]

Can somebody point me to a good simple backup program (to an external
HD), free if possible. But if it's necessary to pay ...

Daniel

There are a load of them out there but I find that Cobian Backup works well
for me. http://www.cobian.se

John McGaw
http://johnmcgaw.com

 

[JS]

Norton Ghost
(has a 30 day trial but you can not create a Bootable Restore CD AFAK)
http://www.symantec.com/norton/products/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=ghost14

True Image (has a 15 day trial version available,
Trail version can create Restore CD, but I have not verified this yet)
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

JS
www.pagestart.com

 

[dev328]

What about the back-up utility in XP under System Tools? Doesn
t that work well to back up to an external HD?

 

[Stephen Harris]

Can somebody point me to a good simple backup program (to an external
HD), free if possible. But if it's necessary to pay ...

Daniel

Well, as long as the second drive is as large as the first,
why not clone all of drive one to drive two? The software
for that is usually free from the manufacturer of drive one.
Drive one is set as master and drive two as slave with jumpers.
The jumper settings are on the back of the hard drives or you
can download a user guide from the drive manufacturer. If
drive one dies or gets infected with a rootkit, then you can
switch the jumper settings and make drive two Master and drive
one the Slave. Boot from drive two which has become the Master
and then clone drive two back to drive one. That will fix
most malware problems, everything is overwritten including the
MBR (make sure you clone the MBR too, if given a choice).

So I'd get the User Guide from both manufacturers plus their
cloning software (which is part of the free formatting software),
and put it in a folder called C:\Drives, which will get copied
back and forth between the drives. I think the User Guide is
helpful for jumper settings, because it avoids having to take
out the old hard drive in order to find out the different jumper
settings (not using cable select). You can do it with tweezers.

Getting the drivers and already installed applications is
the hard part of a systemic clone restore. You can use XP
backup which comes with WinXP Pro, or if you have WinXP Home,
I think it can be installed from the ValueAdd foler on the cd.
It is easier then to make small backups of your email and
..html bookmarks or favorites. I use Firefox just because it
has a utility called Moz Backup which works great for Firefox,
and Thunderbird email which is about equal to Outlook Express.
But you can customize the size of File Edit, View, etc. menu
and the dropdown menulist, by making it larger and bolder if
anyone using the computer is visually impaired. You can find
out what kind of hard drive you have (the manufacturer) by
looking in Device Manager, then copy and paste into a Google
search. You can also look in the Bios when the computer boots
up to find out what the drive is named. For incremental backups
a lot of people use Acronis True Image, which is $50, so maybe
that can wait and be your Christmas present to WallE Junior.

 

[GregNga]

I have Acronis I think it is an excellent tool. It is worth paying for.

 

[Daniel Royer]

Can somebody point me to a good simple backup program (to an external
HD), free if possible. But if it's necessary to pay ...

Daniel

thanks for all the suggestions. I've tried them all (almost). The
problem seems to lie within my external HD, as, with each backup program
I get the same message: "write delayed failed", and there is only
gibberish on the HD.

Daniel