Backup, Clone, Recovery and iso ?

[EagleMark]

Found F12 will boot from LAN!

Looked through some more free stuff and reviews of old I ended up trying True Image 2013 by Acronis. It's rated number 1 and Norton Ghost number 3... Liking it already as the first shot I had a complete backup on USB stick that does boot, and a separate copy on my wireless network hard drive!

Couple options not available in 30 day free trail I like are the non stop backup, which I could stop using the WD Anywhere backup which is OK... Software that came with My Book Live was as worthless as tits on a bull!

Next option is Sync! Will sync files and folders to other computers or devices.

Next is iso images without backup.

[jim_in_dorris]

Congratulations, sounds like your all set.

[EagleMark]

Actually with the hard drive in a slide out caddy, if I have a fail, the other cloned HD just slips in!

[mekkis]

Filezilla is a great option for cloning.

VMWare is your friend, too. Instead of cloning HDD/SSD you clone machines and shuffle machine images around.

[bentrod]

Are you familiar with unix or linux? Several of commands (dd, parted, fdisk etc) are available on just about every distribution. They can do everything and more than norton ghost and are free with no licenses.

If you're interestd let me know and I can get you started. Heck I can mail you a cd.

**edit** I also just read the part of your post that mentions ghost having some sort of "continuous backup" feature or something. If you're interested in that it might be time to look into RAID. Chances are your computer disk controller supports RAID 1, which will provide this continuous backup feature for free, and at a lower abstraction layer (independent of the OS).

[EagleMark]

Filezilla is a great option for cloning.

I've been using FIleZilla for years for FTP and do have the one laptop backed up to server. But no automation for backup. That's when I got a 1 TB wireless back up hard drive My BookLive, which the software sucked, it would not back up what was most important to me? bin, xdf, adx, etc... and they were not on the exclusion list. Since it was new with support WD gave me Anywhere backup software which works great. Have it running on all machines now, continuous so if I worked on a file all day and have a crash I still have my work.

I've only had 2 crashes in ? So many years I can't remember, both recent and both a day before a job! So now I have a backup laptop and also turned the wifes laptop into a backup...

Linux is something I've always wanted to do and I guess one of those old office sever Dell Optiplex sitting over at Rehab may be an answer to a duel boot system? We get 100s of old PCs and wipe hard d\rives clean, re install and refurbish them to give away to people around the community.