free backup program

ok, my boss has a computer that he uses for his servalice cameras and he got an external HDD to back it up on, he can't get it to work the way he wants it to, so he asked me to help him. i'm looking for a program (something like Norton Ghost) that i can set it up to backup every night and then to a full backup on the weekends, i've got till wednesday before i need it, so any imput would be of great help

thanks in advance

You can check out http://runtime.org/dixml.htm it is free imaging and backup software, it is great software. You can also use ntbackup, windows built in backup utility found in accessories > system tools. With ntbackup, to get it to run as a scheduled task the account it runs under MUST have a password associated with it or it will not run.

If you're not using Proffessional exition of XP, I think ntbackup is in a "valueadd" folder on the cd (or hard drive). i.e. it is not included by deafult.

Apologies for lack of clarity, but I know you have to hunt a bit for ntbackup when using Home edition, so just as a word of caution.

nikhsub1 - would the link you posted be able to create a perfect image of a windows xp partition (used sectors only), and compress it, break it down to fit on onto several DVDs (as required), so that I can completely wipe my hard drive and reset up my system, then putting the XP installation back as if nothing had changed?

thanks for the input, i'll check it out, i'm not sure which OS he has running on the computer, but that link should help, anyone else feel free to post also

Lunar_Lamp said:

nikhsub1 - would the link you posted be able to create a perfect image of a windows xp partition (used sectors only), and compress it, break it down to fit on onto several DVDs (as required), so that I can completely wipe my hard drive and reset up my system, then putting the XP installation back as if nothing had changed?

Click to expand...

Yep. Drive Image is really very impressive, I like it better than Acronis. It's ONLY limitation is that you can not restore an imaged partition to a SMALLER partition... but you can to a larger one. By default, it will 'split' large image files into chunks, 1 GB each I believe. The other nice thing is that you can browse an image as if you were in widows explorer, grab files etc. Also on that site check out Bart's PE builder, it is a boot disk creator with some excellent plugins and it is simple to create. You boot up from the disk, it has network support and you can restore your image.

"It's ONLY limitation is that you can not restore an imaged partition to a SMALLER partition... "

Does that mean that it copies every sector, not just used ones? It's frustrating that it cannot move to smaller partition...

Wait - ignore that - I can hopefully use QTparted (or similar NTFS resize tool) to resize to the smallest size possible \o/