Auto ghost onto USB

Nefarious · 13 Jul 2009 at 02:21

I'm looking for ways to back up a my laptop and thought that the best way would be to create an image on an external harddrive.

Does anyone have any suggestions for software to do this?

I know that there is much better support for NTFS in linux these days and that a CD could be set to boot to linux and rsync or similar (rather than creating a brand new image each time which would wear out the disk faster and take longer) but wondered if anyone knew any good guides or off the shelf ways to do this.

Ta!

Nefarious · 15 Jul 2009 at 12:48

Does Norton Ghost have any good options available?

Nefarious · 15 Jul 2009 at 14:40

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The laptop runs XP (I thought the NTFS comment would have been sufficient but in hindsight I realise that it really wasn't).

The idea is that I want a simple backup solution (as I wont always be the one running it) that can be left overnight to create a disk image onto a USB HDD (the capacity required is way beyond that of a solid state drive). Ideally, I'd like it to create an image such that the drive can be taken out of the USB caddie and installed in the laptop should the laptop's original drive fail.

I'll look into MondoRescue running automatically on a live CD

Nefarious · 15 Jul 2009 at 17:32

The reason I posted in the Linux & Open Source section is because I thought that most of the tools that would do what I want would be Linux based and/or open source.

I found one tool that looks good http://ping.windowsdream.com/ping.html but might be tricky to configure to be automatic in the way that I want it to be.

It supports both USB devices and incrimental backup but the software cannot store NTFS ACLs (Access Control Lists) and I have no idea whether stripping these will kill the system or not (advice on that would be helpful).

Does anyone have any experience with this software?

Nefarious · 17 Jul 2009 at 03:07

Thanks for the responses, the best answer so far seems to be Clonezilla.

It does require rebooting into a Linux environment but will allow incremental refreshing of an image and most importantly of all it allows for the creation of an autoexecute script so that no user intervention is required