Image your system with free Macrium

No need to experiment with your system and data. Go and image a "non vital" partition or drive on your XP system and then reload it. I always keep a "testing partition" around, just for that purpose. In the picture it is the "Extra Partition F: ".

Have just made an image, with the free version, to my internal HDD in a separate partition.

A few things:

I tried both medium and high compression and the difference for a 14Gb C drive was only about 300Mb - so hardly worth doing

I am currently, I think, making an image to an external DVD. However it does say via a popup that it should be a re writable cd/dvd. Mine is not and it still appears to be working - Would this be correct or does it in fact require a rewritable dvd?

My transfer speeds are slow compared to Drive Image, which I cannot use, approximately 150-180Mb/s compared to 900Mb/s for DI. Are these speeds normal and is there a way to speed it up

Thanks

there's a good idea.... never considered it. I'll give it a try after i rest from all these images.( We spent a wonderful vacation in the black forest and southern Germany. I should have the language my parents did....... As you know Florida is a second home for Canadians. )

sunbeamtalbot said:

Have just made an image, with the free version, to my internal HDD in a separate partition.

A few things:

I tried both medium and high compression and the difference for a 14Gb C drive was only about 300Mb - so hardly worth doing

I am currently, I think, making an image to an external DVD. However it does say via a popup that it should be a re writable cd/dvd. Mine is not and it still appears to be working - Would this be correct or does it in fact require a rewritable dvd?

My transfer speeds are slow compared to Drive Image, which I cannot use, approximately 150-180Mb/s compared to 900Mb/s for DI. Are these speeds normal and is there a way to speed it up

Thanks

Sorry I cannot help you here. I never use CD/DVD to write anything. I have 6 external disks and an extra internal disk drive that I use for that. The idea having to a bunch of CD/DVDs around scares me - with my sense of order - LOL.

wilfj said:

there's a good idea.... never considered it. I'll give it a try after i rest from all these images.( We spent a wonderful vacation in the black forest and southern Germany. I should have the language my parents did....... As you know Florida is a second home for Canadians. )

I am glad you had a good time in the Black Forest. I hope the weather was nice. You would not want to be there today - weather is dismal as I hear on the German webradio. Can't beat Florida this time of the year, although right now it's a little nippy too - in the 60's F.

Have just completed a DVD image on 2 disks but after changing to the 2nd disks it gets to 100% and says Saving Index but the DVD just continues to spin and there are only 2 options on the dialog box Hide and Cancel - How long does it take to Index and if I cancel is it all wasted? It has been in this state for about 10 minutes

Thanks

Sunbeam:

You are getting a real life lesson in why DVD backups are a pain and can be problematic. Unless you have an over-riding reason to back up to DVD, I would avoid it and stick with hard drives. You can buy a high quality drive for $50 that would certainly store a lot of images.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to put an image on the same hard drive as the source, even if it is on a different partition. If that drive fails, your image is not likely to be accessible. Use a second internal or an external.

ignatzatsonic said:

Sunbeam:

You are getting a real life lesson in why DVD backups are a pain and can be problematic. Unless you have an over-riding reason to back up to DVD, I would avoid it and stick with hard drives. You can buy a high quality drive for $50 that would certainly store a lot of images.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to put an image on the same hard drive as the source, even if it is on a different partition. If that drive fails, your image is not likely to be accessible. Use a second internal or an external.

Amen !!!

To bring this to a silent close, I've left the Building with my image on my External hard drive.

Thank you for the tutorial WHS, is there a particular procedure for purging an image manually?