The Mother Board

[goodguy]

Hi. Can anyone advise me on a good disc back up program.

At the moment i have acronis home 10, which i used to create a disc image, size was almost 4 gig.

But when i used the back up everything slowed down. The second time the pc used to freeze randomly and

became unstable. So i reinstalled windows. And my gigabyte mobo came with xpress recovery 2 which i have used to create another back up, not sure but i didn't have anything else at hand, tried google to find anyone

who has used xpress recovery 2 but no luck. Can't be that good if there is no feedback on it.

Also have partition magic, my hdd is 320 gig WD, only using 4gig as it is a fresh install. Partiton magic wanted 320 gig to create a copyof a 4 gig system. Too much!
Any advice?

[slingo]

Are you backing up your data to the same hard drive??? If so, when it fails you'll lose all your data.

Just get another hard drive, external or internal and use microsoft synctoy.

[Big Jake]

Acronis is a good choice for backup software ... but note that Acronis Home 10 is two or three releases behing the current version which is Acronis 2010.

My advice:
1. Partition your 320 GB hard drive into a "boot" drive and a "data drive". Keep only the OS and software installs on the "boot" drive. A boot drive of 30 GB is probably sufficient unless you have tons of software you plan to install.
2. Invest $100 or so in an external USB/eSATA drive dock and a hard drive. The Vantec Icy Dock with a Seagate 1 TB SATA II drive works fine for me. Your milage may vary.
3. Direct all your application data to the data drive.
4. Back up or "image" the boot drive and "data" drives (partitions) periodically to the external drive. Make up a naming convention so you know which backups are data and which are your boot partions, and which are most current.

Jake
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Lenovo T61 T7300, 4GB RAM, 200GB 7200, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 512 MB, XP Pro