Whats a good (non-norton) Mirror backup?

[Simaril]

Looking for mirror backup software, and desperate to avoid the evil that is norton. I'm more concerned about software corruption than drive failure, so I'm afraid that a RAID setup would be counterproductive. Any suggestions?

[psob2]

you might like Acronis True Image. the trial version will work for 15 days i think   http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/

it works great for copying HD's(acronis calls it cloning).
for backups i just copy my HD to a spare HD once a month and keep the spare on a shelf

also has some image and backup features i haven't tried.

[Ghosth]

I did a quick search on google.

C-net recomends Acronis, and C-net has yet to really stear me wrong.

The other one I saw near the top was Arctor.
http://www.byteplant.com/products/arctor/features.html

I have to admit I've never used either.

[Simaril]

Originally posted by psob2
you might like Acronis True Image. the trial version will work for 15 days i think   http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/

it works great for copying HD's(acronis calls it cloning).
for backups i just copy my HD to a spare HD once a month and keep the spare on a shelf

also has some image and backup features i haven't tried.

The spare hard drive idea is a good one...and with mass storage at current prices, thats a very competitive solution. Do you just tell windows to copy the entire C drive, and that gets the registry/OS and everything?

[psob2]

i don't think you can just use windows to copy a hard drive to another and get a true bootable copy. thats the reason for programs like acronis and the free hd copy programs that come with a new hd.

the benefit of the acronis true image, at least for me, is that it is much faster than the free copy programs. 20, 25 minutes for 60, 70 gig of data against a few hours

to use acronis, install it, then restart your machine as the program requests to complete  the installation.
then what i do is turn the machine off, open case and add the drive i use as the backup as a slave and leave my actual drive as the master. restart windows, go to my computer(or windows explorer) make sure windows sees the extra drive then open up true image and go to clone drive. then clone(copy) your master(original source drive) to the slave. true image will tell you it has to reboot to perform the operation, clic ok. it will restart and copy the source to the destination. when its finished turn your machine off and disconnect the slave drive. if xp boots with the slave connected xp will assign a drive letter to that drive(slave) and it won't boot as a single C drive until you go into disk management with the extra drive installed as a slave and remove its drive letter assignment. to test that you have a true bootable copy - set up the backup drive as the master, leave your original drive disconnected during this step. if the copy is good, it will boot up and everything will work like on your source drive. shut machine down disconnect the backup HD and reconnect the original drive as master and put the extra one away.

how to install drives as slaves and masters varies on the setup, if its ide or serial.

if you aren't sure what you are doing - do it on another machine first to get comfortable.

the acronis site has better instuctions than what i've written. i'm self taught and might not have all terms i used technically correct. what i wrote is how i use it. it sounds worse than it really is. you just have to be clear in your head about master and slave drives

WARNING-- be careful which direction you copy. make sure you are very clear which is the source and destination drives. cause its going to change the data on the destination  drive  to match the source drive. if you do it the wrong way you will lose all your stuff

[jigsaw]

Another vote for Acronis.  I used to be a big fan of Norton Ghost, but it doesn't play nice with some of the newer Nvidia chipsets. Since switching to Acronis, I've gotten on a more diligent schedule of backups. It's very easy to use.