Simple, Easy, Fast HD Backup Method?

[Max]

Yesterday I loaded up an old copy of DiscWizard and did some
experiments with backing up my C drive. What I found was that
DiscWizard will quickly and reliably copy my C drive to my D drive.

After making the copy, I shut down and changed the boot order in BIOS
and was able to boot off the D drive (now C). I then reformatted D
(the original drive) using DiscWizard and copied the disk back to D
and was able to boot from D, after changing the boot order again. All
of this was done from Win XP with no boot disks, etc. My computer
doesn't seem to care if the boot disk is a master or slave, BTW.

While messing around with DiscWizard, I also discovered that this
software will let you create boot disks, which among other things,
allows you to fill a hard drive with zeros.

You can download DiscWizard from the Seagate website and it works with
different brands of hard drives.

The software is free, very fast and reliable. DiscWizard makes
backing up hard drives so simple, easy, fast and reliable, I can't
help but wonder if I'm missing something.

Are there any drawbacks to using DiskWizard that I don't know about?
Why should I buy backup software when I can get DiskWizard for free?

 

[Max]

Here are some answers to some private mail I received:

OS: XP with SP1

FORMAT: NTFS

The target drive boots perfectly after switching the boot sequence in
BIOS.

My hard drives are a Western Digital (WD400BB - 40Gb) & Seagate
(ST320424A - 20Gb). DiscWizard gives a warning that no technical
support will be provided when using drives other than their own, but
doesn't appear to have any problems formatting & cloning other brands
of hard drives.

DiscWizard doesn't require that you do any resizing, etc. It happily
clones back and forth between the 40Gb and 20Gb drives doing
everything automatically.

I used DiscWizard 2002. I haven't tried DiscWizard 2003.

I originally installed the program to the C drive and then cloned the
C drive to the D drive. I've cloned these back and forth, as an
experiment, a half dozen times or more and never encountered any
errors. The DiscWizard seems to be very reliable. I've also used
it's format function which seems to be very reliable also.