making a backup harddrive on to disks?

[ztx]

Hey guys, I'm kinda new at the whole backing up your harddrive thing, and was wondering what kind of programs could make a backup of my external harddrive?

It's making some weird sounds at times, kinda like a dieing engine, or something, and I'm worried that all my precious data on it might be lost.

Thing is, I'd move some files over to my main, but it's pretty much full. (7gigs left of 120gigs) and this external is about 55gigs.

Also, when I back up the hdd's progs, does that mean when I get a new harddrive, I just insert the disk, and point the disk files to this new harddrive, and the program will automatically be moved over? So no installing is nessessary? I think there only some individual progs, I just want to back up, along with data.

Or will I need to back up everything?

Thanks again!

[Gizmo]

You're on the right track. I've used Symantec's imaging/ghosting software to do the same job and works pretty well. All you need to do is connect your new hard drive up, obviously making sure it has a filing system on it and that it's detected in the BIOS and in Windows. Then from there, just tell the software what ISO file you want to be written to the new hard drive and away you go. Unless the image file has an extension that the ghosting software doesn't recognise (very unlikely), in which case you'll be better off using software that can make images and ghost them.

[amigo]

I've used Norton Ghost and Paragon's Drive Backup 6 Professional. Both are great programs.

[ztx]

Hmm, so do I have to back up the OS inorder to also back up the programs?

How is the interface for Norton/Paragon? Which will perform the best for backing up programs + media to dvd+r disks?

Would Nero's BackItUp work fine? Can it back up programs and the such?

[amigo]

Paragon demo here: http://www.drive-backup.com/corporate/server/index.htm