Norton Ghost v. Rescue and Recovery

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Hi-

I have a 100 gb network HD that I want to replicate my laptop too and I was wondering which is better, Norton Ghost, or IBM Rescue and Recovery Ultra 4? I want to just have an easy way to recovery my whole drive, programs and everything in case something goes wrong. Is one better with dealing with the hidden partition (which I don't need to back up) than the other? I have ghost 2003 but I see there is version 9 out now. I have never used either so I would really appreciate some comments from people that have. Thanks in advance-

-Dan

[mdarnton]

I think you may hear from a lot of us who like Acronis TrueImage as opposed to anything that starts with the name "Norton". . . .

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I haven't heard of that before. I'll have to look into it. Can you tell me why you like it (as opposed to R&R or norton, besides for the fact that it is a resource hog)? I only plan on backing up my drive like once every month or maybe 3 times every 2 months. Thanks-

-Dan

[edelrc]

I have use TruImage, Ghost and DriveImage. Have not use IBM's one though.

This is a brieft comment on them:
-Acronis TruImage. Simple, easy and fast. It is in a third distant position on sales, but users are the happiest. Support, due for not having the market of the otherones is a little more limited
-Norton Ghost. Very fast backups. Compression is very good too. However, I have found a couple of instances were backups were corrupted. (after hundreds of backups though).
-Powerquest DriveImage. OK, there are two versions that are very different; v.6 (2002) and v.7 (2004).
V.6 backups were slower than the Norton and Acronis products but backups, one completed you can trust the most that they are not corrupt. However it showed sometimes some problems when saving backup into a NTFS partition.
V.7 is huge and did not test it much, looks good but you'll neet the net service.
I could have been using any of them, but for a matter of chance I ended up using primarely DriveImage v.6.

For making a backup once or twice a month, any of them will be great. Decide on price if you don't have concerns of compativility or so. You even may considere no to install it... just make a bootable CD with their rescue CD and you'll be very happy too.

[ibmuser]

the current version of rescue and recovery is really much, much better than previous versions. works well, though it does take up more disk space as a download than trueimage. i've used true image before - great program, but i've reverted to the ibm product.

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Thanks for the help. I am downloading the TruImage demo now so it looks like I'll be trying them out for a little while.

[Myung]

I have been using R&R 4.0. The problem with it is that the hard drive gets very fragmented after installing the backup image to the hard drive. Since it is a hidden partition, the Windows Defragmenter cannot do anything with it.

Does anybody know how to do the defragmentation on the hidden partition? I ended up with deleting the backup on the hard drive and saving it to CDs.

Thanks.

[edelrc]

To defragment a hidden partition you need to unhide it first.
For defrag, windowsXP defrag utility is not too bad, but I found that Diskeeper is quite better.

Finally, if you are concern that when restoring backups, the restored files are fragmented, move to DriveImage. It makes backups and restores in the same level of fragmentation!

[Leon]

Does R&R 4.0 put the backup in the same hidden partition as the Access IBM stuff, or does it create another hidden partition?

[Myung]

I don't know where R&R4.0 put the backup. After transferring the backup to CDs, I have erased the backup in the hard drive. In my 30GB hard drive, the local backup takes up too much space.

And thanks for suggestions, edelrc! I will look at Diskeeper and DriveImage.

The reason why I was worried about the defragmentation is that I started to get the error message (the memory read error "0700xxx.....) after the backup. And without the local backup, it seems fine.

[edelrc]

Myung,
Diskeeper is the best, but do not invest much on it. XP defragmenting tool is usually good enough. Then DriveImage v6 (2002), is terrific (just make sure its directory does not gets compressed by XP! DriveImage v7 is complete but too big for my taste and you need .NET service installed.
Acronis and Ghost are good choices too and less HDD consumers, mostly Acronis.

If the memory error 0700xxx..... appears only after restoring an image, it does not look like a defragmentation problem, but something worse... that the backup image may have not been as accurate as it should!

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I tried Acronis True Image and I do like it, especially that it can compress so well. I now just have to figure out the pros and cons of that compared to rescue and recovery. can i restore acronis images through ibms recovery feature on the hidden partition? my image is stored on a network drive. other than that and the compression i am not sure what to look for to decide between the 2.