Which is the best free backup program?

Hi pp,

That's really bad luck.

Not sure why, because I don't have a fancy pc - but I never had a problem with any kind of boot disc.

I am using a USB mouse, but just a standard ps2 keyboard.

Did you try the Todo ? - best to try the boot disc first -in case you have the same problem.

You could try the Seagate AT11 freebie - that has quite a big boot disc - probabaly more drivers.

http://www.seagate.com/support/discw...rdSetup.en.exe

It's abig d/l just to check if the boot disc works - but I guess it's the only way.

You are supposed to have at least one Seagate/Maxtor drive, or it will complain.

SIW2,

Yeah, it is bad luck. I updated my earlier post and I just got done trying EaseUS todo and it completely hung.

I think some of these apps are having trouble with the fact that I used EXT4 for / in Ubuntu 9.04. Also, the fact that I have Ubuntu on the box at all is causing some of the apps to have trouble...unfortuantely so many things are designed and tested with just Windows in mind.

With regards to keyboard, my mobo has a PS2 adapter...but alas we have 0 PS2 keyboards at work...so I cannot try that. I can obviously boot into other linux distros and use my keyboard and mouse......so nothing out of the ordinary there.

Edit: I don't have a Seagate or Maxtor drive...so I don't think that the AT11 freebie is going to do the trick for me. My drives at home and at work are all Western Digitals at the moment. My bad luck just keeps continuing.

I'll try to bring in a PS2 keyboard from home and give the restore another go with the Macrium Rescue application. It will be interesting to see if it chokes anyway with the fact that I have Ubuntu and EXT4 on the hard drive. At this point, I'm about ready to rebuild the box anyway. I'll likely just put XP and Win7 in a dual boot and then image with the Win7 backup at that point. This is just a screw around lab machine at work...so I'd like to get to a point where I can get multiple versions of Windows back on there pretty quick. And be able to use it for other purposes and easily restore back when i want it for a test workstation again.

Well, I did bring in a PS2 keyboard from work today and it didn't change anything whatsoever.

However, I did remember that I had previously downloaded Clonezilla and I fired that up. This worked properly and I was able to backup and restore. While it wasn't quite as fast as Macrium, it was a smaller output size which is nice for storage purposes.

Clonezilla successfully backed up and restore my triple boot environment and was able to handle ext4 on my Linux partition with no trouble whatsoever. It may not have the slickest user interface, but it's got the necessary functionality.

Dinesh said:

macrium is good. i still use windows built in backup feature.

I liked macrium...but it didn't care for any of my keyboards.

As far as the MS backup utility...it works just fine and I've used it at home. However, in many places I dual boot with Linux and the MS system image utility doesn't handle the Linux partitions at all. Thus not suitable for me in these environments.

Glad you found something that works for your setup.

SIW2 said:

Glad you found something that works for your setup.

I'm not sure why I didn't try it sooner...I already had it downloaded and have used it in the past. Guess I got so tied up reading about these new fandangled applications that I felt it necessary to give them a shot. Oh well, stick with what works.

Thanks for taking the time to post about these other applications. I'm sure they are very helpful and work for most other members.