i want to backup two of my hard drives onto one external usb hard drive, but i want them compressed in something universal like .zip or something...i've used ghost, and i like it, but i'd really like something that produces zip archives split into specific sizes (say, 4.35gb so it can be burned on a dvd)

yes, i searched.

no, i did not find anything useful.

2/17/2006 5:51:06 PM

Ghost will automatically span across multiple DVDs if you select it as your image destination. Copy DVDs to external HD when done with folder labels such as "HD1_GHOST_DVD1", "HD2_GHOST_DVD2", etc.

If you are looking for more flexibility, use WinRAR. You may not get *all* of your files with that though.

[Edited on February 17, 2006 at 6:10 PM. Reason : .]

2/17/2006 6:09:14 PM

how would winrar skip files? i mean, i already use it as my zip archiver...

i have two internal drives, one that i use as "my documents" and the other contains my work files...i'm not trying to backup my windows drive at all...so would it still skip files?

2/17/2006 6:19:48 PM

WinRAR

or

WinRAR + PAR2s

or

Ghost.

As mentioned ghost can be set to break images apart at certain sizes to make the images easy to store on disk. And if you use Ghost Explorer (which should come with any legitimate version of ghost) you can pick individual files out of the images.

2/17/2006 6:41:41 PM

WinRAR doesn't miss many files, but its almost impossible to get ntuser.dat and a couple of other files Windows has perpetually in use. If you are looking for a backup of music, documents, etc. you probably won't have to worry about this. If you are looking for a full backup and restore of your hard drive in case crap happens, Ghost is the way to go.

[Edited on February 18, 2006 at 6:50 PM. Reason : .]

2/18/2006 6:49:46 PM

yeah...like i've said, i've used ghost before, but i wanted something a little less proprietary (i don't know why)...i'll do the winrar thing tonight (it used to take ghost 8 hours to back up my drives) and see how it turns out in the morning...thanks for the suggestions, everyone!

2/18/2006 7:27:43 PM

you can't do a full system backup from within windows with most programs, winrar included. But it can do volumed archives.

So, make a ghost image, then rar it.

2/18/2006 10:05:53 PM

yeah, but then i have still have to have ghost to access the files...if i were to be able to use something like winrar and put it in zip format, there are dozens of programs that could open them up (which is what i'm trying to do)...plus, doesn't winrar (in rar format) support encryption? i don't think ghost does

2/18/2006 10:12:16 PM

so pack the installer for ghost IN the rar archive.

and you can password protect zip/rar, but its retardedly easy to crack it. if you want real security, you need another level of encoding.

2/18/2006 10:14:57 PM

hmmm...for some reason i thought the latest version of winrar did 128-bit aes...but i have to double-check that...i might do the ghost installer thing

2/18/2006 10:21:49 PM

well damn, news to me. If that's the case, rock on with it

2/18/2006 10:58:04 PM

just fyi to anyone interested - winrar 3.51 does aes-128

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_archiver.htm

2/19/2006 2:30:54 PM