Decent Backup Program

I'm looking for a back up program, freeware or shareware, that meets
the following requirments.

Doug McDonald...

What I have is a strategy. It actually worked, as I have
thrice actually had total disaster.

I backup whole physical disks periodically, about once a
year, using Ghost. This is commercial, but the old version
we have a site license for still works fine. Ghost
allows copy partitions to a larger physical disk.
I copy to a larger disk and keep the original as the backup.

For in-betweens, I backup spasmodically my data to CDs. I'm
paranoid about doing this if I am doing tricky programming,
for saving the photos I take, for my genealogy files,
and for business matters. I backup important e-mails I get
to paper. Otherwise, I'm just prepared to reload commercial
programs if they get lost in between Ghosts.

The only real pain a better backup would have saved me was
one, just one, day's worth of tricky programming which was
lost when my computer died near the end of a day's work. But
it was still clear in my head. This was quite memorable: it
was the trickiest part of the code of my very own program
for drawing ancestor trees, with lines connecting every
instance of the same person involved in cousin marriages. I
can send this to anybody interested in it.

Doug McDonald

1) Must be able to compress backup files to 2/3 the original size or
less.

Dennis Lee Bieber...

No honest backup program will promise any particular compression
ratio -- if one is backing up lots of, say JPEG images or ZIP files, the
compression algorithm can actually result in a larger file...

2) Will allow me to create a disk-image of my HD.

3) Must be able to handle NTFS and FAT32 partitions.

Perhaps, someone can assist me in my efforts.

Edward Feustel...

I don't think you will find a free one.

Retrospect by DANZ/EMC is what I use. It can back up NTFS and FAT32.
Versions exist for doing the backup over a network, for copying to another
disk or
DVD, cd-r. Most output devices are supported.

Retrospect produces a catalog of what is on the DVD (s). It can use this
catalog to do an
incremental backup, continuing on the remainder of a DVD or a new DVD.
Restoring can
be a single file, a directory, a mixture, or the whole thing.

You can choose compression, encryption, and verification. Can't guarantee
that compression
will reduce the files as much as you want. If it is text, perhaps more.
JPGs, perhaps less.
But if you want really accurate restores, you don't want lossy compression
anyway.
Ed

Charlie Hoffpauir...

First, sorry to say I don't know of a freeware program that will do
what you need.... but if you decide to buy a program, look into
Acronis True Image. It is available as a trial (limited use) so you
can at least be certain it will do the job before you buy it. I
downloaded the trial from their web site, tried it out, but decided to
buy a copy from Newegg rather than activating the downloaded trial
copy because I got a better price from Newegg.

I highly recommend the program. However, your requirement #1 will
depend entirely on what type of files you are attempting to compress.
Some file types compress a lot, whereas others not hardly at all.

Charlie Hoffpauir

John...

Definitely test Acronis on your specific hardware. I tried it a
couple of versions back and spent more time fighting problems with the
trial version than actually using it. Their tech support was
responsive, but I lost interest in running 10-12 hour backups to help
them determine why it didn't work over my local network when tools
such as xxcopy ran fine (and in less time) when backing up the same
drive to the same other PC on the network.

Running it one time to learn the product and one time to test a "fix"
for them was more than enough of my time spent in "beta testing".

Hugh Watkins...

Eagle...

I don't seem to be very well hidden.

As for expanding my data I communicate regularly with all the sincere,
capable researchers of my line.

I think the best way in the foreseeable future is through DNA. As
people test and post their marker numbers to a central clearing house
people will be looking for matches. My DNA is already posted.

Also message boards abound and I frequent them.

this is really a general computing question which would better be

hugh W

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/