Cloning a Hard Drive

[Confused old man]

In the past I have used Symantec Ghost 8.0 to clone my hard drives. It was a very good and easy to use program.

I am wondering if someone knows of a program that works as good. With Ghost I was able to make a direct image of my hard drive . Once completed I was able to boot off of the new hard drive.

I have been looking at Paragon Hard Disk Mgr. and reading the posts here. From what I am seeing, using Paragon HDM I would have to create an image first and then restore the image to a new hard drive. Also I am not clear on the steps to clone a disk.
1. Is cloning done from the windows enviorment or from a
bootable CD?

2. Can I create a clone drive using a USB interface?

In the case of a laptop I don't want to have to remove the hard drive inorder
to clone the drive.

I would appreciate any comments

[Arvy]

Yes, the Paragon HDM 11 Suite includes options for "cloning" a partition or an entire hard drive. They just call those options "Copy Partition" and "Copy Hard Disk" and they can be run form either the Window interface of the installed HDM application or from its bootable CD.

If you'll take the advice of another old geezer, however, you'll create full system backup images for "rescue and recovery" insurance and keep them current with regularly scheduled incrementals. That "extra step" involved in restoring a backup image won't seem like such a big deal if you ever actually need it.