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Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
- 3,672
Normally when I need to make a harddrive image, I just use linux with the dd command, optionally piped through gzip or even bzip2 (or once even 7-Zip where space was the biggest concern) -- or alternately, sometimes I use PartImage (but since it still claims NTFS support isn't 100% after all of this time I try to avoid it for anything seriously important.) However, there's absolutely no way I could possibly try to explain to someone who isn't very computer savvy how to restore a backup stored via this method (especially if it has to be piped through an external decompresser...) Even over the phone wouldn't exactly be an easy task and it could be a pain to get them to setup a remote control method. What I would like is something that could be somehow automated -- or at least much closer to automated. I'll admit my linux expertise doesn't extend as far as really building my own custom distros or even real scripts (any script I make for bash or whatever is just a command list so really isn't any better than the most basic of batch files. There's no way it could be "smart" enough to definitely figure out exactly which drive to write to or anything like that.)
I can imagine something like Norton Ghost would be really easy to use, but I don't really want to go around telling these people to buy it. For that matter, I refuse to buy it just to setup their images for them when linux is free and is every bit as good (if not better) for my own uses. (Especially given how much it costs to do what I can do just as well for free...) Is there anything available that might be more user accessible to average users? Preferably even something I could setup to boot from the same media as their actual backup file, but that's not a high priority, just as long as it could be something they could deal with on their own.
I can imagine something like Norton Ghost would be really easy to use, but I don't really want to go around telling these people to buy it. For that matter, I refuse to buy it just to setup their images for them when linux is free and is every bit as good (if not better) for my own uses. (Especially given how much it costs to do what I can do just as well for free...) Is there anything available that might be more user accessible to average users? Preferably even something I could setup to boot from the same media as their actual backup file, but that's not a high priority, just as long as it could be something they could deal with on their own.