What is the fastest imaging app?

Long View,

I use these Snapshot disks for testing. Boot time (from power on) for...

Floppy is 60 seconds

CD is 35 seconds

BartPE CD is 3 minutes

BartPE on the HD is 45 seconds

 

what do you mean by CD is 35 seconds ? I know about BartPE - just too slow. I will try the HD but how would I get your 35 seconds CD ?

 

I created a floppy from the "Create a Disaster Recovery Diskette" choice. Using WinImage a .IMA was created. Then a .ISO with UltraISO. A CD was burned from the .ISO. The floppy/CD allows Networking, but a slow setup. It also allows UDMA drivers to be installed and NTFS access.

 

Even easier. Use Nero to create a bootable CD from your Snapshot floppy.

 

Thanks Brian - easier said than done. I will have to find an old floppy drive and floppy disk and then a machine old enough to plug them into unless there is a program that will allow me to use a virtual floppy ?

 

It's unfortunate that the "Create a Disaster Recovery Diskette" must be written to "a bootable disk on drive A:"

Worth doing as the CD boots quickly and it doesn't take long to type in a DOS command line for the restore.

 

I just tried booting from the CD with a USB HD attached to the computer. It booted to an A: prompt but no NTFS partitions were seen. That's bad. Unplug the external HD and NTFS partitions are seen. Anyone else noticed this?

Not good if your images are on an external HD.

 

Not to hijack the OP question but it seems to me that the priority lays in how reliable and trustworthy is your choosen imaging app.as to compared with others,speed for me is not that important.

 

I must be lucky. I've tested most of the image/restore apps and never had an image or restore failure. Despite all being reliable in my computers, there were a few apps that concerned me in view of the trouble experienced by others. Still, individually we have our favourites.

 

Long View,

I forgot one method.

VistaPE CD is 90 seconds.

Actually, this would be my choice (apart from BartPE on the HD) as DS runs in Windows mode.

 

I think that you are all overlooking one very important aspect; data retention. After all, that is the primary reason behind imaging, is it not? Loading DS from the harddrive or using a floppy to do is is pointless. Let's say you get attacked by malware that renders your drive(s) useless. What then? How will you restore. "Well", you say, "I still have my floppy." True but images cannot fit on a floppy disk. So, your images would have to be stored elsewhere...on optical media.

True that might be slower. But I like having everything on one DVD+DL; my active image and my "Stuff" image. Very few people, I would assume, would be using external harddrives. And that's good because, frankly, I don't trust harddrives. I'm guessing you don't either because you use imaging software.

Prepare for the worst, hope you never have the worst happen, but be greatest when the improbable worst happens and your prepared.

 

Nate,

Regarding backup media, many people feel CDs and DVDs are not to be trusted. We should keep at least two backup sets. I prefer an internal and an external HD backup and don't use optical media backups at all. Some use optical media as a secondary backup.

This is a quote from one of the Ghost programmers regarding backups and optical media. I think this is a majority opinion.

 

Telling from experience use ext. harddrives is fastly more convenient,even for a desktop user let alone managing huge network environments.

 

My comment wasn't geared toward convenience. Of course it would be easier to image to an external drive, but would it be safer. Mechanical parts can fail; harddrive can fail. When (If) that happens what will you do?

As far as imaging to a network location, that's in completely impractical for the vast majority of home users.

 

That's true. But the same argument can be made against using harddrives. But in my case, where my images are able to fit on a single DVD, I also include an image on optical media.

 

From the above quote...

This is the main point. Optical discs are less reliable than HDs. And re-writable discs are the most unreliable.

 

Hey, look I have an above quote. Does that make it true? No. They are still scary as hell. (Thank you Stephen King.) The fact of the matter is there are no parts that can fail on optical discs. The same can not be said for harddrives. As long as you close the session and verify written data you are good to go. The data will, for all intents and purposes, always be there, barring scratches. Again, the same cannot be said for harddrives because they rely on magnetics, read-write heads (which can easily be damages), etc.

 

what DVDs do you use ? My preference is for Taiyo Yuden although I admit that some others are not bad. get the right drive , with good firmware, write speed not too fast and not too slow ( so many think that slower is safer), use a good burning program, store in dark conditions ( I use wodden cabinets) ensuring that temperature and Relative humidity are correct and you can expect the disks to be good for years. Use crappy disks and let your children play with them and they may not last a week.