afraid i don't know of any good free software. good paid programs would be Casper XP and Norton Ghost.
its a dam good program for the money Acronis True Image 10 Home $49 dollars.. Backing up is easy to do! Acronis True Image 10 Home creates the exact copy of your hard disk and allows you to instantly restore the entire machine including operating system, applications, and all the data in the event of a fatal system crash or virus attack — no reinstallations required! With the new version you also can easily back up your music, video, and digital photos, as well as Outlook e-mails, contacts, calendar, tasks, and user settings with just a few mouse clicks! * Copy your entire PC, including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data using our patented disk imaging technology. * Backup your music, video, and digital photos! * Backup your Outlook e-mails, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, signatures, news folders, e-mail rules and user settings with just a few mouse clicks! * Restore all the settings for Microsoft Office, iTunes, Windows Media Player and dozens of popular applications! Your computer with Acronis True Image Home on board Your computer with Acronis True Image Home on board . . Backup and restore your entire operating system Backup and restore your music, pictures, and videos Backup and restore your Outlook e-mails Backup and restore settings for your applications . Get product: Upgrade Download free trial Price for $49.99 Buy Now Acronis True Image 10 Home ATI Home vs Workstation View all features In PDF formatUser guide (3.1 MB) In PDF formatData sheet (0.1 MB) New features introduced in version 10 * Supports Microsoft Windows Vista — Ensure that you can protect your system if you upgrade to the latest version of Windows * Backup your music, video, and photos — Preserve your digital memories * Outlook backup — Preserve your emails, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, signatures, news folders, e-mail rules and user settings with just a few mouse clicks * Application protection — Protect your application settings and avoid the time consuming process of redoing your custom settings * Quick backup of specific files — Initiate backup of specific files without being in the Acronis True Image application * Restore application settings — Avoid the hassle of customizing your applications again in case of failure * Explore backups — Easily search and recover particular files in archives just like in Windows Explorer * Create backup rules — Ensure that you never run out of space by setting limits on the amount of space allocated for backups, the number of backups and the amount of time you keep backups * Email notifications — Peace of mind by obtaining notification that your backups have completed * Save to FTP — Flexibility to store your backups where you want to read more here http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
if ye do not want to spend the bucks heres a free one..i did not test this so all up to ye DriveImage XML 1.20 Author: Runtime Software Date: 2007-01-16 Size: 1.7 Mb License: Freeware Requires: Win All DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives. The program allows you to: Backup logical drives and partitions to image files Browse these images, view and extract files Restore these images to the same or a different drive Copy directly from drive to drive Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler Image creation uses Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe "hot images" even from drives currently in use. Images are stored in XML files, allowing you to process them with 3rd party tools. Never again be stuck with a useless backup! Restore images to drives without having to reboot. DriveImage XML runs under Windows XP Home, XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 only. The program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS. download here http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4919.html
adadds give a link and info when ye suggest a program EASEUS Disk Copy High-speed sector to sector disk copy software for hard disk. Disk Copy utility offers a very fast and easy way to copy all or part of a hard drive to another hard drive. Disk Copy is a FREE software, which can create an exact (Mirror Image, Disk to Disk) copy of your old disk, including the operating system, applications, personal preferences, custom settings, and all of your vital data. Disk Copy can be used for backup, cloning, or Upgrading your original small hard drive to a new larger drive. Essential Utility for Disaster Recovery. Supports all IDE hard drives. Sector to sector copy. Works with pure FreeDos operating systems. Safe, simple and fast! http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm
I have to agree with -ireland- on this one. We use this program in the field on in the shop every day, plus its USB bootable so no opening in the case to get to your IDE. There is a bit of a learning curve but very small to beginning users. There are so many things you can with proggy and I give a FULL 10.
