Jim Walker wrote in message
...

Drive Image is rather more powerful in that many of the
operations are done at the Win level, which means that
whatever is working currently with external drives at the
win level is available for image files. But you still cant
image the boot partition at the win level, so that can
be a big problem with external drives, because it doesnt
prove any dos driver for those. And its relatively expensive
basically because ghost is so cheap currently.

I have a question related to your statement.
I am going to clone to an external USB HD.

You do actually mean clone and not write the image file to
the USB drive dont you ? Thats one area where there is lots
of confusion with imaging programs that will also clone. They
are quite different operations and both ghost and DI can do both.

You wouldnt normally want to CLONE to a USB HD because
you wouldnt normally want to boot from that cloned drive.

I have Drive Image 2002 (same as Drive Image 6)
and I can't do a copy to the USB drive.

You should be able to do that with other
than the drive you are booted from.

You cant do that with the drive that DI has been booted from.

The info on Drive Image 7 says that USB is supported.

Yes.

It is unclear if all of that can be done in Windows or DOS.

It is done at the Win level with 7, but clearly restoration from
an IMAGE file on a USB drive with say no bootable hard drive
is more tricky. The user manual just makes a VERY cryptic
comment that
• Must have supported storage

device drivers to restore from

PQRE; could require additional

media along with the

PowerQuest recovery CD

Its not clear to me just what they are saying there with USB
external hard drives and either the restore from the USB drive
on a boot drive failure or a reverse clone, back from the USB
drive to the new replacement internal drive on drive failure.

You'd normally boot from the distribution CD to
do that and its not completely clear if that does
support all USB drives in that particular situation.

The new Ghost also states that USB is supported.

Yeah, but its even vaguer about exactly what is supported,
particularly in the situation where the main boot drive has
failed and you want to restore from an image file on the
USB external hard drive to the replacement boot drive.
Certainly Ghost 2003 uses dos USB drivers in that situation
and its not clear if Ghost 2004 is any different on that.

I will buy one or the other. Any thoughts?

Short story is that I havent gotten around to trying that
particular situaiton carefully with external USB or firewire drives.

Both have fully functional demo versions for download so
one obvious approach is to try those and see how it goes
if you have a spare hard drive to try restoring to from the
external drive for a test.

I havent check for reviews on that either.

The other thing worth checking is V2i Protector which goes
much further than Drive Image, doing fully automatic incremental
backups at the Win level as well as crude brute force images.
That should ensure that you are much more likely to be fully
backed up at hard drive death time than with ghost or DI.