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Need Portable Back Up Solution

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I do a lot of re-installations of Windows for clients at their homes. I’m looking for the best way to fully back up ALL their disks and then recontructing their data on the new OSs.

Currently I use Norton Ghost & DVD/CD drives. I would prefer to use a utility that would run completely from a disk and back up the data to a fireWire HDD or something. The point being is that I like to have the full restorability of Ghost but without having to install Ghost on the target system. The old ImageDrive software used to do something like this. I’m thinking I might need a solution for PCs that do not have a fireWire connection too…

Thanks for any help in advance,
-q

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Well with Ghost you can make a Floppy that works on boot up without the need to install the entire program. It can even accept Firewire or USB ports and load the required drivers as well as the CD/DVD & SCSI if required.

Personally I would be looking at a USB external HDD caddy with a HDD of your choosing inserted into it these are firstly cheaper than the prebuilt ones and you have the option of actually choosing the size of the drive that you want. Most also have a external power pack so there are no problems with drawing too much power from the USB ports in the computer.

Unless you are working with computers with only Firewire connections like the Apple products USB is a better although slower alternative and will be of far more use to you.

Col

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1. Use USB HDD.

2. You can use Ghost but then have to restore whole images to extract what you need.

3. Alternatively, copy all the data and directories straight across to the external USB drive and copy back when done….

4. Finally, if you want to stick with Ghost, you don’t have to install it on the target (or source) machine, a floppy may do or if you perform a lot of support tasks, you may want to look into BartPE. (www.nu2.nu)

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If you want to have GUI based access to NTFS drives to copy data directories selectively to an external device, download and burn the ISO image of one of the Live Linux CDs, for example Knoppix from http://knoppix.org or its Gnome-based cousing Gnoppix from http://www.gnoppix.org.

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