Need suggestion for cheap or free "incremental" backup software x

[yoda313]

I have a usb western digital 160gb hard drive and I'm finally going to use it for regular backups. However I want the backups to be the original files so I can use them interchangeabley on my other computer.

I have two things I'd like to do:

1 - incremental backups of either my whole 80gb (only 62 is used) os drive on my emachine -

2 - incremental backups of my vista pc.


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Ok next question - could I acutally partition the usb drive and make one side for xp and one for vista??? I have 149gb useable on my usb after formating. I have 62gb on my main drive on my xp machine and a lot less than that on my vista machine. Could I set it up so that I could use my one usb external drive to backup both hard drives??? Is there an app that supports that???

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I saw norton ghost but I'm not sure if you can buy it seperately any more. THey now have something called norton 360 which includes ghost but is 70.00. Thats a bit higher than I'd like to pay. I'm looking for like 30-40 tops if I can't get a decent freeware app.

Has anyone done this yet? Use a single usb hard drive to backup both a xp and vista pc????

[AlecWest]

I saw norton ghost but I'm not sure if you can buy it seperately any more. THey now have something called norton 360 which includes ghost but is 70.00. Thats a bit higher than I'd like to pay. I'm looking for like 30-40 tops if I can't get a decent freeware app.

I just got Norton Ghost 9.0 from these people - price $29.99:

https://pronetcd.com/detail.asp?PRODUCT_ID=10281772

It also comes with a working copy of Ghost 3.0 which is good for older OS versions and Linux. Not sure about your USB question, though.

Just a brief off-topic comment. HBO is reshowing all the old Star Wars episodes. I just got done watching Episode 4. When I first watched it, and when I watched it later a number of times, I was able to "suspend disbelief" in a lot of things. But when I watched it this time, something hit me.

The Empire didn't want to "confront" the rebels, they just wanted to "destroy" them. If the Empire really wanted to destroy the rebel base, they didn't have to confront the rebels at all. The base was located on a moon that orbited a lifeless planet ... and the Death Star could have just as easily destroyed that planet as it did Alderan. With the planet destroyed, the ability of the moon to "orbit" it would also be destroyed ... and the moon (and rebels) would have just gone spinning off into space. Mission accomplished without a fight.

Yeah, I know. It's a bugger when you find logic snafus like this. I suspect I'll never watch Episode 4 with the same enthusiasm again (sigh).

[yoda313]

The base was located on a moon that orbited a lifeless planet ... and the Death Star could have just as easily destroyed that planet as it did Alderan. With the planet destroyed, the ability of the moon to "orbit" it would also be destroyed ...

Ok let me tackle this one:

I'm sure in the "LUCAS" universe the death star laser is inneffective on a Gas Giant. First of all we don't even know today if Gas Giants really have a solid core even deep deep down in the center. Much less one of any substantive mass. So "LUCAS LOGIC" would have it that you can't blow up a gas giant because there isn't enough mass to detonate into an explosion.

Now of course you could argue the laser beam would interact with and superheat the planets gasses enough to at least alter the orbit of the giant. This in turn would foul up Yavin 4's orbit as well and probably making inhospitable.

HOWEVER remember one important thing:

THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION AND MEANT FOR ENTERTAINMENT

I'm sure it would have been a whole lot less successful film if the first (chronologically first) Star Wars movie ended without a giant explosion but a shifted planets orbit.... thats a YAWNER - instead you make the death star do a detour so the good guys have extra time to blow THEM up



So what do you think Alec??? Make you feel better???

[AlecWest]

So what do you think Alec??? Make you feel better???

Hmmmm ... sounds like some giant gas to me, hehe. Yeah, I'll probably watch it again. But here's another scenario (grin). Why just put a tracking beacon on the Millennium Falcon? Why not turn it into a flying bomb ... detonated once the Death Star notices they've reached their destination?

THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION AND MEANT FOR ENTERTAINMENT

OK, I'll buy that (grin). Hope the Ghost info helped out.

[SquirrelDip]

For disk imaging I've used Acronis and for day to day backup of my server I've set a script using MS Backup to a USB drive. The script runs weekly and saves the previous weeks backup (and deletes the third week).

I've been using VMWare to host a Trixbox VM (Asterisk VOIP) and another Linux VM web server - considering I don't have heavy usage the VM works extremely well (and makes backup a breeze as well as transportablilty).

[mill48]

I've used Acronis for a number of years for complete backups (although I do not backup to 'original files'). Cloning my 37GB notebook hard drive (30GB used) takes about an hour and a half using a USB2 external hard drive. Not free.

For daily backups (of Documents & Settings), I use the Backup facility in W2K and then run a batch file to create a ZIP file; the backup and ZIP routine run while I'm sleeping. Backing up about a half-gig takes about five minutes, with another few minutes to ZIP. FREE!

I've used XXCOPY before to make 'original file' copies of files, and the creator now has XXCLONE to clone Windows systems (XXCOPY can be found here; XXCLONE can be found here). Don't recall how long the XXCOPY process takes, but it is not speedy because of the file comparison if creating an exact copy of the drive. Neither is free, but not too costly.