Aside from Norton Ghosts and Windows Restore, what other restoring programs available?

Question

I am having very bad experience with Windows Restore and Norton Ghost. One is terribly slow in the process of saving restore points, one barely restores at all. Is there a recommended software that can easily create restore points and actually do the restoration?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Windows Restore and Norton Ghost do two completely different things.

Windows Restore only saves selected information and attempts to restore to certain points. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't because it isn't backing up everything.

Norton Ghost makes a complete image of a drive and using it to restore will wipe the whole disk and put it in the exact state it was in when the image was made.

I prefer Acronis True Image to Norton's Ghost. You will quite often see an older version of True Image supplied on a cover CD for computer magazines
http://eu.acronis.com/

Answer 2

Dont take me the wrong way, but how many restore points do you need? Windows Restore is used in the event that your system becomes unstable. You can always restore it back to a previous point. How often are you installing or removing software? Pick a restore point and live with it.

Regarding Ghost, this is good for making an image. Again, this is used usually once, with incremental backups of your data files.

Both operations are fast and easy.

Now, if you are doing this on some kind of test system, where you are intentionally installing,tweaking, trashing, changing - then this is a different story - but you didnt state that.

If you have an additional large drive, you could also try MS Backup available on an XP Pro CD.

Normal user operation: Make a restore point for your OS and applications, then do incremental data backups.