I am sure a lot of us are familiar with Ghost and others. I instead decided to use the open source clonezilla (clonezilla.org) to back up all of my windows and linux boxes to an external 2T USB drive... Why? Because I feel it's the right way to back up:
PROs: The right approach; rock solid
CONs:
Total cost: $149 for the 2TB USB drive.
- It forces you to shut down the computer you want to back up, so that you can back up a steady image of a disk, and complete with boot sectors and all
- It is a bootable (actually Linux) mini-kernel, that you boot from your CD ROM; you just have to download clonezilla once and then burn as ISO image to a blank CD; the free http://infrarecorder.org/ is good enough (just click Write Image, point to the downloaded ISO image and insert a blank CD)
- Then plug in the external USB drive back-up device, to write to or read from
- Point to the disks you want to back up (practically any filesystem - windows, linux, Mac, et al)
- Select the disks and/or partitions you want to back up, and go
PROs: The right approach; rock solid
CONs:
- Must be somewhat of a computer geek to understand the options presented; on the upside, you can just select all defaults, and be careful when pointing to the back-up device and the internal disks to back up so not to mix them up. Even if you get the drives backwards and end up backing up the back-up device itself to the internal drives, there is no harm done because it saves everything in its own directory off of the root directory - so you can't really mess up anything.
- VGA text interface
Total cost: $149 for the 2TB USB drive.