Free Image-Backup That Can...

I certainly understand where Jo Ann is coming from. While you and many other Wilders members are technically savvy, I believe the 'ordinary' end-user may find a boot-menu intimidating. An imaging program where starting a restore is a similar process to that of starting a backup, makes for a more user-friendly interface. In the case of a non-bootable system the most reliable restore solution is a 'live' boot (recovery) disk. And the latter method can also be used if the former method fails.

TS

 

TS, I couldn't have said it better. Our end-users are definitely not technically inclined. I'm just glad that I've gotten across the importance of system backups!

After testing most of the backup solutions suggested in this thread I find AOMEI Backupper and Paragon BR(free) to be just what I was looking for. AOMEI's interface is the more user-friendly of the two so that's the one I'll probably recommend to my end-users (I just need to do a little more testing).

My thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

JA

 

I took this thread as an opportunity to test a couple of free sector based backup solutions on my rather ancient computer (Celeron 1.1 GHz, 576 MB Ram, MMX and SSE, but no SSE2, system drive formatted as FAT32, so no VSS available).

My conclusion is identical to Jo Anne's, AOMEI Backupper takes the lead by a wide margin. Just one note for users with older machines where the internal HDD is IDE, not SATA. The AOMEI Linux based recovery CD and also the Linux restart part of the software both do not recognize my internal IDE HDD. It looks like the Linux part of the software has been compiled without IDE support.

The workaround is to create a WinPE based recovery CD. Requires download and installation of WAIK, but the whole process is painless even under WinXP.



Cheers
manolito