PC utilities forum: Clone or image - best disaster recovery method?

Here is what I do, with Ghost 9.0

First off, isn't amazing that all the "customizable" desktop PCs will NOT install a 2nd hard drive. My current Dell is 5 years old, Dell would not install a 2nd hard drive so as soon as I got my new PC, I opened the case and installed a 2nd drive.

I also have an external hard drive.

I Ghost my C drive to my D drive and both of them to my external.

I don't know what difference between "clone" and "image" is, to me they sound the same.

Ghosts are usually compressed versions of what you have and I'm not sure if you can do daily backups of your work to the ghost.

A Clone is great but still requires daily backups to ensure you don't loose data or anything else you have written or downloaded that day.

With both of these methods you can still looses data / work if you have a crash before you've backed up.

If you run RAID (or possibly a Striping system) your data / work is duplicated across your drives as you save it. If you loose one drive, you just replace it and the RAID system then copies itself to the new drive. You may find that having a second Internal drive, and running a RAID system, is you safest bet - and a lot less trouble.

I too have been using DI 2002 for many years very successfully. What I need it for is to make periodic images of my C drive which only has the OS on it. I have my programs installed to another partition. I have now got a netbook that has no optical drive, ASUS 900HA, and have managed to partition it into a small C and D,E and F for programs, pagefile and storage.

Problem is that Drive Image will not restore to an NTFS partition although I can make an image and store it on a FAT32 partition. I have managed to extract Ghost32 which appears to be corporate version 11 from the recovery DVD but I find the GUI different and not as intuitive as DI. I am a bit reluctant to try and convert to Fat32 as not having done this before I can see a disaster happening

Is there any way I can get DI to work with the NTFS file structure or do I have to use something else like Ghost. Could I use an external HDD and clone to achieve the same - this is not ideal as I like to restore from the within the PC without additional things attached especially as that I why I got the netbook for traveling light.

Thanks

What is G4u and not sure what FTP out means. But basically I do not want to "clone" but image. But then again am not sure of the true distinction between them.

I only periodically \want to make an image predominantly of the C drive particularly when I have installed something new etc. This is not an everyday operation so I guess I am a bit reluctant to learn new software but command line operation does not scare me.

Does G4U operate from within the OS or does it require booting to DOS

Could you point to some more info on it

Thanks

It appears that I need to have a floppy, FTP and server. I have none of these available.

Referring to my original post I would like to make and restore an image from within the netbook without extraneous equipment. This is what I currently do with my desktop. If needs be I can make a bootable CD of the image but to date I have not had the need for it. My current procedure can be done in a matter of minutes and to my thinking very simply using Drive Image. What I would like to know is is it possible to do this with Ghost32 V11 in a like way? As I last resort I could convert the file system to FAT32 but am reluctant to do this as I can forsee problems.

"..You have dismissed all software made to date. "

I joined this forum because I respect the formidable ability and generous responses

I am not presumptuous enough to say that I know about all software indeed I am probably only aware of perhaps less than 1% of that available.

All I am trying to achieve is the ability to have an image on the local HD that I can access without additional things eg USB sticks, external HDD, networks etc. My abilities in these areas are limited but I had no problems with DI 2002 working from my pc from a partition.

Good luck to you that you can run from a usb stick you are obviously immensely more talented than I am