Separate partitions (boot, data, etc)

free linux imaging software you might want to try, think he has some tutorials on their use too.. :- http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/new-coo…#mozTocId873558



tutorial on clonzilla and partimage at least :- http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/free_im…g_software.html

Terry - Clonezilla is great. I prefer the tutorial at the Clonezilla site itself rather than deoimedo's, but this was a great link to get me in that direction.

It does exactly what I needed - save an image of the whole internal drive to an external USB drive, MBR and all partitions. And of course it has a "restore" command too.

Just to get the hang of it, I've made images and restored the HD from them.

I haven't investigated the partition imaging (save image of a single partition, restore a single partition). But I'll experiment with that too!

So Clonezilla will take care of the need for saving/restoring 'whole disk' and most likely, 'whole partition' images.

I'll need to combine it with an incremental back up tool. I don't want to go with Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image, since the former doesn't work on my computer (the Linux rescue disk doesn't work), and the latter is one for which folks here recommend the 2010 version, but I can't download that as a trial for a week or two. So I'll look around.

Thank you Lee for reminding me to save an image of the D: partition to an external USB HD every now and then… I'll have to put that in my schedule of maintenance tasks.

Of course, just when you think everything is going swimmingly, Murphy's law kicks in (no relation to me, as far as I know). Sometime yesterday, I completely messed up an 8GB USB stick. I guess I must've pulled it out w/o removing safely. So I've been trying to recover from that nightmare. Once I've finished dealing with it, I'll get back to this.

thank you, Lee, Ztrucker, and Terry, for all your suggestions. It's cool that a free non-windows tool (CloneZilla) is the one I'd selected as the best so far for disk image saving/restoring.

Linda

it's the one i use too. can't recommend a sync program for incremental backups tho because the one recommended to me(haven't used it yet, i manually backup, but going to, when i do a clean install of latest suse later this month) only works for linux as far as i know, it's called luckybackup.

What do you think about using 7zip as incremental backup tool? I wrote a script (.bat or .cmd) which would create archive which is the difference between a full .7z archive and the current state of the folder on disk, and I set it up to run regularly from the Scheduler (in XP). I've sinced reinstalled OS, so I have to hunt it down and set it up again.