From: "chris"
Date: 05/19/2004 4:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Message-id:

in my system I have 2 hard drives 80 gig each

hard drive 1 has 3 partitions
hard drive 2 is blank at the moment - I want to use this drive to store
backup of drive 1

can anyone recommend any software that can do incremental backups each day
at a particular time so that if my main hard drive fails I can restore it
from the backup by say using a floppy boot disk and it will restore the
whole drive as it was originally from the 2nd hard drive.

I know backup in XP will back the drive up and restore it but only after
installing xp on the computer first.

I want to do it like a restore disk that some pc manufacturers supply with
new systems

I hope I make sense

thanks for your help in advance


I recommend Drive Image, from Powerquest. Better than incremental backups, it
does a full backup, basically a snapshot of the entire partition or multiple
partitions, which makes for a very easy disaster recovery restore from a boot
floppy (which DI will also create). The images are compressed, and the unused
space is ignored, so you should be able to save multiple images on your second
drive. (Example: I have 4 images taking up a total of about 8gb which
represents about 13gb actual usage.) And you can schedule the backups too. It's
not free, but it's worth every penny. I've been using it for several years.
Works with all versions of Windows. (I have no connection with Powerquest -
just a satisfied user..)
Chris