gHacks technology news » hard drive backup http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Hard Drive Backup Software http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/02/hard-drive-backup-software/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/02/hard-drive-backup-software/#comments Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:10:36 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=8012 Creating regular backups of important data is an important task that should not be skipped unless you are prepared to setup they computer system anew and still loose important data like emails, office documents or photos.

We covered Windows backup software before at Ghacks but never before a portable software that could backup partitions and hard drives.

ODIN, which stands for Open Disk Imager, is a portable Open-Source backup software that can backup partitions and hard drives with the exception of the system partition. It is currently available in a very early beta which should not be used in a productive environment.

The hard drive backup software is able to backup or restore data. The current version is easy to use. Backing up data basically involves picking a drive letter or physical drive, selecting a location to store the hard drive image, optionally changing a few parameters and hitting the start button.

hard drive backup software

The options provide access to a few interesting settings like turning on gzip or bzzip2 compression, splitting data into chunks or saving only used or all blocks of the partition or physical drive.

Restoring an image is as straightforward and easy. The user has to pick the partition or physical drive and select the image that should be restored.

The hard drive backup software has a few limitations which probably will be removed in later builds of the software. The inability to create a backup of the system partition is probably the biggest.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/02/hard-drive-backup-software/feed/ 4 Drive Backup http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/15/drive-backup/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/15/drive-backup/#comments Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:34:14 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=6183 Paragon Drive Backup Express is a free drive backup software for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista. Well, almost free because a registration is required to receive the product key for the drive backup software. The Drive Backup Express edition has a reduced functionality compared to the commercial Drive Backup Personal Edition, it is however providing all means to backup drives and restore them to (different or the same) partitions.

So what is the Drive Backup Express offering in detail? It obviously allows the user to backup to hard drive or partition if it is currently accessible in Windows XP or Windows Vista. The Drive Backup version only supports backing the data up on other drives that are connected to the computer but that should be enough for most users anyway.

The archive that is created during backup is compressed, it used roughly 17 Gigabytes to backup my 50-something Gigabyte hard drive. On the other hand that drive had a lot of free space, only 19.2 Gigabyte were filled with data.

The images that get backed up by Drive Backup Express can be restored which means it’s possible to backup partitions or complete drives. Resizing is supported as well.

That’s basically the functionality of Paragon Drive Backup Express. The commercial Drive Backup software supports several interesting additional features like incremental backups, backup encryption, backup on CD / DVD and file restoration.

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