best software to back up my pc with ?

newstuart

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I have just bought a basic ex-company dell pc from ebay, it has windows 2000 pre-installed together with all drivers etc but does not come with any discs.
What is the best (and ideally free) software to back up the machine, either to a new partition or a DVD disc so that if it gets a virus or anything i can restore it without the original discs?
 
I use Acronis True Image, again not free but does allow you to do full image back-ups, incremental back-ups or just back up individual files and folders. It's very good and I would recommend it.
You can get it here ...
http://eu.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
I actually use version 9 but version 10 is out now (looks to be more flexible with settings for individual programmes).
 
If you want to copy a complete image of your drive I would use Norton Ghost but I do belive you can get freeware which will do just the same thing. Have a look on softpedia for hard drive ghost tools.
 
Not free but the best of all is:
Fit a second HDD to the computer (links set for "slave")
Use Casper XP (http://www.fssdev.com/) to clone your normal HDD. In the course of which you can alter partition ratios etc. Casper XP works easily from a Windows environment, not DOS.
When disaster strikes, as it will, swap the links on HDDs such that the old master is slave and vice versa. Switch on and the PC will boot up perfectly. Clone the drive again. Either stay on the second drive or reverse the links again to go back to where you were. If you use links with long tabs (old Dell machines had them) then link swapping is very easy - just have to take the tower side off.
 
A few of the magazines have been giving away Acronis TrueImage 7 the past few weeks, that might be worth looking at (I haven't tried my copy yet but it is meant to be good)
 

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