Most reliable way to do full "image" backup

[mikealevy]

Just received my new X60, and once I install all my apps and data, I want to create a full/complete hard drive "image" backup. Then I want to test it by doing a full restore, to make sure the process works.

Planning to use an external (USB) hard drive for the backup.

Any suggestions on the easiest, most reliable way to do this?

[Kyocera]

Mike, click on the HD clone in my sig and read through that.

[stephenaron]

I would like to do the same thing, but assume there is a way to take an image of my T60p drive, and store that image on an external drive, not necessarily a specific drive.

[mikealevy]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

I'm going to use the FREE trial version of Acronis True Image 9.0 -- I've been researching reviews and it appears to be pretty highly rated -- and appears to do what we need.

I checked with their Sales Department, and he said "there is no issues to upgrade your trial version to full one, as well as no negatives from trial" -- except what was mentioned above (e.g. must use Windows).

To get their FREE tech support via email, I think you have to buy the product and be a registered user.

[coolsilicon]

Haven't tried to store the image on a USB-hd yet, but was very pleased with TrueImage 9.0 Home apparently supporting the S-ATA-hd of my T60 off of the included (bootable) installation-CD. This way I restored an image that I had created and that was stored onto another partition of the same hd. AFAIK, the restore-process could be initiated from within Xp either.

[Clockface]

To add to the other posts here, if you have two or more partitions on your hard disc, or if you have two hard discs in your laptop (do laptops ever have two or more hard discs?), then you can, for example, create an image of the C: drive, and store it on the D: drive (providing of course that drive D: is a hard disc (physical or a partition) and has enough free space), and then if you like you can burn it to CD/DVD or send via a network or USB to another computer.

If you only have one hard disc with one partition, then you can create a second partition, without having to reformat your C: drive, although this does involve some risk, especially if the power fails during the task - it won't damage your computer (I can't see how, it's just software reading and writing to the hard disc), but it might well cause you to lose everything on your hard disc, although the risk is very small, as the software should be well protected against data loss.

I mention this as other people who want to create an image of their C: drive might not have access to an external drive, but if they have (or can create) a sufficently large D: (or E:, or F: etc) drive then they can create an image onto that drive, to do with as they like later. Use something like Partition Magic, or similar to create a new partition if you need it (or to enlarge an existing partition to acomodate the image file of drive C: that you will be creating), and Ghost (or similar) to create the image.

To transfer the image, you could use a USB drive, or a USB .mp3 player. I have a cheap mp3 player that has 1GB of storage, and I used that to transfer my C: drive image from my laptop to my desktop PC so that I could burn it to CD (my laptop cannot burn discs). I couldn't write the image file directly to the USB drive (.mp3 player) as it was created, as the image creation program I used was DOS only, and the USB ports cannot be used through DOS (as far as I know), but if you use a Windows based drive image creation utility (if one exists) then you could probably write directly to a USB drive (or over a network).