The Ghost Alternative

When your hard drive fails or your computer starts experiencing some problem that is too tricky to fix, there is nothing like having a full image of your hard drive to recover from. No need to install windows, apps, etc . . . just restore the image in a single step that takes 5 - 10 minutes and you are right back where you started.

In the past I have used Norton Ghost for making drive images. As nice as it was to have that disk image when problems came a long, the effort to create the image in the first place was a bit much. As a result, I haven't used it in a couple of years.

Yesterday, I decided I would like to have an image of my current notebook. I've been doing a lot of travel and exposing my notebook to more risk than usual. When I started looking around I ran across Acronis True Image. This product is amazing. It really solves two issues.

First, it can quickly make an image of your drive while you are still using your computer. With Ghost, you first needed to make a boot disk, boot from it, and then use a DOS based interface to make the image.

Second, it also will work as a backup program, storing only what has changed since the image was created.

This is exactly what I needed.

In the past I tried to burn my images to CDs. This time I took a different approach. I went out and bought a new external USB drive with plenty of capacity. BTW, the program does some compression as it makes the images and incremental backups. This will allow more backups to be retained on the external drive.

After I made my first image, I ran the "Verify" option on it just to make sure it was created properly. I am using the Home version of this product (still on the 15-day free trial). At the time I am writing this is is priced at $36 through Amazon. If you are willing to spend a little more you can use the