Hard disc imagaing question?

[Denvers Dawgs]

I just read about this new (Free) disc imaging software DiskImage XML. It says "Restoring an image to a target disk will delete everything on the disk and copy the contents of the image to it. That means you cannot restore an image to a drive you're already using (because you can't delete the contents of a disk already in use). So if you booted up your computer on your C: drive, you can't restore an image to your C: drive. You need access to the target drive as a secondary disk. There are a few ways to do this. You can install the target drive as a slave in another PC in addition to its primary boot drive, or you can buy a hard drive enclosure and connect the target as an external drive."

My question is, are all imaging software like this? With TrueImage are you able to restore the image it creates to the drive you are currently using?

All I'd like to do is make an Image of my drive after I do a clean install and add all my programs, prefences, etc, so if my drive did fail I could painlessly create that sane basic PC was before the crash. Instead of having to reinstall OS, then Updates, then Programs, etc.

[redwudz]

At least with True Image, and probably others, you create a CD or floppy bootdisk and boot to that, then you can format the original boot drive, or copy your backup image to the original boot drive as it's no longer the boot drive at that time. Then when you remove your boot disk and reboot, the original drive again becomes the boot drive.

[Denvers Dawgs]

Slightly confusing, but I think I get it...

So if I have a drive that is 65.6GB but only 23GB is used, how big would the image be? the full size of disc or just 23GB, if using true image?

[Des]

Ghost will allow you to do this as well.

I use True Image at the shop (and home) the image it creates is considerably smaller than the used portion of the drive but I couldn't tell you what the ratio is.

I probably didn't help, I seldom do, but at least I contributed to the conversation

--dES

[stiltman]

I think you're missing the whole point of HDD imaging.
If you store the restore image on the same HDD that your created it from, you gain nothing. If the drive fails, you loose the OS and the backup image.

Best method is to store the backup image to either a 2nd HDD (internal or external) or to store the image to a CD(s)/DVD(s)

[Denvers Dawgs]

Oh I know not to store in the same drive. I've have an external to use. I may also but it on dvd/cds if its possible as a 2nd saftey.

I was just curious the amount of space on an external or the # of discs the image would take up.

[stiltman]

It really all depends on the compression scheme the software has.
Ghost for example has 4 different settings for compression
fast
slow
max
none (sector by sector) (used mostly for forensics)